Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Funding was happening in Israel?

Rotem Shor: Seed and Series A was in Israel. In Round B, non-Israeli venture funds joined.

Sramana Mitra: By Series B, you had the third client?

Rotem Shor: Yes, but we had more of a thesis. We still got traction from users.

Sramana Mitra: How much money are we talking? Seed was $1 million.

Rotem Shor: A round was $6 million, and B round was $17 million.

Sramana Mitra: Without figuring out what business you’re going to be in, wow!

Rotem Shor: Yes. Omri moved to the US in 2016 and started our office there. We started growing from 2016 2x year over year.

Sramana Mitra: In revenues or users?

Rotem Shor: Revenues.

Sramana Mitra: From pharma?

Rotem Shor: Yes, then we raised the C round one year ago.

Sramana Mitra: By the time C comes along, you had figured this out.

Rotem Shor: Yes, B round was a tricky round. Are you familiar with 7wire Ventures?

Sramana Mitra: No, I’m not.

Rotem Shor: Greg Tullman is part of 7wire. He founded Livongo that went public. Then he founded another company. They understand what we are doing in terms of technology and where it can go. The market is changing. If you are thinking about the healthcare market, it started digitizing in the last few years. Pharmaceutical companies are very traditional.

Sramana Mitra: In where you are today, you have figured out the product and you have figured out everything. What is the product today?

Rotem Shor: Today, we are providing digital support for patients in specialty brands. We call them specialty patients. They have many challenges in the US. For example, access to drugs. By that, I mean I need my insurance to approve to get my drug. I need a shipment that should come at a specific time because I should get it to the refrigerator right away.

Also if you need to pay this drug out-of-pocket, you need to pay thousands of dollars a month. Then you come into scheduling issues. I need to inject on the first day and then the fourth day. Then there’s the maintenance period with the side effects.

We are helping patients digitally. If in the past you needed call centers, today we are providing layers of support to patients. First help them with access, affordability, and maintenance. We are also supporting pharmaceutical companies because patients are not dropping due to bureaucracy or side effects. We’re saving them money because we can reduce the number of social workers or nurses who are supporting the patients.

Sramana Mitra: What is the deployment model? Is it an app that sits on the patient’s phone? What is the brand of that app?

Rotem Shor: Not only app but also emails and text messages. We are developing all sorts of solutions to create this omnichannel holistic support. It’s all coordinated. The brand of this app is whether the pharma brand is coming inside. In some cases, it could be white-labeled.

Sramana Mitra: What are you learning from the market? Do they prefer the Medisafe brand?

Rotem Shor: It depends on who you’re talking to. Marketing prefers the pharmaceutical brand. Let’s say an Advil patient. There are patients who are managing all sorts of comorbidities. Most of them are poly-pharmacies. They are taking multiple medications. Having this white-labeled is not necessarily what is good for the patient.

Sramana Mitra: You decided not to go the B2C route. You have chosen the B2B route.

Rotem Shor: But we still have the app.

Sramana Mitra: When the pharmaceutical companies are working with you, they understand that it is better for the patient to have the Medisafe app with multiple medications being managed. That is understood?

Rotem Shor: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: We are in 2022. What’s the current situation?

Rotem Shor: We have agreements with more than a dozen of the major pharma organizations. We are rapidly approaching around 10 million patient users on our platform. We continue to grow in both B2B and B2C.

Sramana Mitra: How do you price this? Is this SaaS?

Rotem Shor: We are SaaS.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor
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