We spoke with CEO Grant Gordon about the past, present, and future of Artemis Health.
I’m not intimidated by many things in life, but healthcare is one of the few exceptions to the rule. I’ve sat through many a health presentation and it usually ends with these thoughts:
- Wow, that was a lot of numbers I don’t understand.
- Wow, that was a lot of words I don’t understand.
- What am I paying for again?
I am not alone in my confusion of healthcare programs and their benefits — companies also struggle when it comes to setting up healthcare programs for employees and making sure they have access to the best possible benefit plans.
Ideally, a platform would exist that could identify what benefits program best suits a company’s employees, using data to easily track and explore possible problems/solutions….
Oh wait, this platform does exist and it’s called Artemis Health. If you haven’t heard of them, that’s intentional — Artemis has been flying under the radar, but no longer. In conjunction with a $8.3 million Series A round led by Maverick Ventures, today is the coming out party. Let’s get familiar with Artemis Health.
“I’m definitely one of the CEOs who errors on the side of show, don’t tell,” said Grant Gordon, CEO of Artemis Health. “We raised an $8.3 million Series A and we’ve had some really exciting milestones. We’ve crossed one million users on the platform, we have a couple dozen customers now with some great success stories. I feel like we now have something to tell the world.”
Artemis began as an idea in early 2013. Gordon and his fellow co-founders — Dallin Regehr and Dallen Allred — had worked with advertising technology but felt an itch for something different. Noticing a lack of quality software in the healthcare industry, they began examining options.
“If we were going to sink blood, sweat, and tears into something new, we wanted something that helped us sleep better at night, in addition to being a challenge to work on,” said Gordon. “Maybe if we looked at the healthcare space, we could bring some of our software and data skills into play.”
Artemis Health was accepted into the Blueprint Health Startup Accelerator in New York City in July 2013 — Gordon points to this as the time when Artemis really began taking shape. By the end of that year, Artemis had secured a $1.2 million seed round from Kickstart Seed Fund, Peterson Partners, and various angel investors.
“To be totally honest, we were lucky enough to get Kickstart Seed Fund to back us and we kept ourselves very small for two years,” said Gordon. “We really spent our time doing our homework, getting our security infrastructure in place, getting our policies in place, hiring attorneys, talking to customers to figure out what was really valuable.”
Quick, random aside: if Grant’s name was actually Dallan, this would be the greatest story in the history of the world. Three Dallin/en/an’s, three spellings, one company — I just created the slogan and if Grant ever chooses to change his name, Artemis can use this for free.
Anyway, back to the story. After an early concentration on healthcare provider-facing data, Artemis shifted to employer-facing data and began working on ways to provide larger companies with data-driven insight into the process of offering employee benefits plans.
Citing a 2012 landmark study that found 30% of healthcare dollars are wasted, Gordon believes the current version of Artemis Heath’s platform can identify a lot of that waste while also providing solutions.
“We help employers offer healthcare benefits to their employees at the lowest possible cost,” said Gordon. “Our product ingests all their data, normalizes it, and we run a bunch of models on the data pointing out where they have problems, potential overspending, or populations that are underserved. It will help them build a business case to roll out new programs, change benefits design, etc, and then help them measure the impact of change, to make sure they are getting value and their employees and families are getting value.”
Artemis currently works with larger companies (1000+ employees) to identify where healthcare dollars are being wasted. Among many features that enable employers to find the best benefit plans for employees, one stands out: it’s easy to use.
“We have these models pre-built, users can jump in and use them as a starting point,” said Gordon. “They can easily point and click, explore the data without having to be an expert in data analysis.”
This leads us to today’s funding news, an $8.3 million round led by Maverick, participated in by existing investors. After intentionally keeping the team small in the early days, Artemis is starting to grow, with roughly 50 employees now stationed at their office in downtown SLC.
“At this point, we’re really in growth mode….ultimately, where we really want to be is in a position where we have enough employers on the platform that we can exert pressure on the healthcare system and make it more efficient overall,” said Gordon.
