A Case Study in Equity Crowdfunding: Cary Breese, CEO of NowRx (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We did a case study on Modernizing Medicine. You may be familiar with this company. This person is an experienced entrepreneur who has done it before. Their product is also a health IT product.

They didn’t use an equity crowdfunding platform. They just did a very successful funding round with physicians and had their customer base invest in their company. 

Cary Breese: I’ve seen that work well with what you are describing. I know some companies that are more online e-commerce businesses. They have a big user base to market for investments. It didn’t work that way for us, but I do see the appeal of that approach. 

Sramana Mitra: How much money have you raised so far?

Cary Breese: We did a series B. We also did crowdfunding. We are at $20 million with our series B. In total, we have raised $30 million since inception. 

Sramana Mitra: The series B crowdfunding round also had the same experience? Did you recruit new investors through Google AdWords? 

Cary Breese: Yes. We went out and did our recruitment. We spent our marketing dollars to recruit investors. We used the same platform. We had a great round and oversubscribed. 

Sramana Mitra: That is awesome. This is an incredibly interesting story. Where are you now? What are the metrics of the business? 

Cary Breese: We finished the year at under $14 million in revenue. I’m an FCC-filed company now as part of our crowdfunding, so I don’t hide our numbers.

We have delivered more than 200,000 prescriptions since inception. We have more than 30,000 customers and are growing. We have more than 3,500 physicians that have referred patients to us. The 2020 revenue had a 90% growth over the previous year.

We now have eight micro fulfillment centers in and around California and Arizona. We have now expanded outside California for the first time. We have a facility outside Phoenix in a town called Mesa in Arizona.

We are excited. We are embarking on our nationwide expansion this year. We will be looking to raise additional funding to help support that. 

Sramana Mitra: Are you going to continue raising the same way?

Cary Breese: I’ve had enough conversations with VCs now and looking at the landscape, I think we are going the VC route this round. Crowdfunding will always be a great option, but for our next round, we are looking to raise around $100 million.

Sramana Mitra: I’m looking at the case study. Physicians are fairly wealthy people. While the rank-and-file investors may invest more denominations, if you can tap into your physician base, then you can get them to write much bigger checks. 

Cary Breese: It’s something that we will consider, but we are looking at VCs as well.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : A Case Study in Equity Crowdfunding: Cary Breese, CEO of NowRx
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