The healthcare startup world received a brand new unicorn on Tuesday, as Silicon Valley-based Solace Well being closed a $130 million Sequence C funding spherical, bringing its valuation to greater than $1 billion.

The spherical, led by IVP, introduced Solace’s fundraising complete since its founding in 2021 to $211 million. Different buyers taking part within the spherical included Menlo Ventures, SignalFire, Torch Capital, Impressed Capital and RiverPark Ventures.

Solace is a healthcare navigation startup that goals to assist sufferers and households discover, coordinate and pay for healthcare – usually extraordinarily troublesome duties within the US.

“We’re addressing the gorgeous broad downside that American well being care is not excellent. It isn’t a great expertise for lots of people,” mentioned Jeremy Gurewitz, CEO and co-founder of Solace. “The friction that exists between folks and getting actually high-quality care is in every single place, and that is why we’re working to unravel that downside total.”

Gurewitz based the corporate with Chief Product Officer Sara Sargent, primarily impressed by what he skilled over the past months of his mom’s life. She had died a number of years earlier from pancreatic most cancers, and he had seen how Kafkaesque and traumatic it was for her to hunt and get the care she wanted.

And Gurewitz famous that his mom had considerably extra privilege and familiarity with the well being care system than most. She was a health care provider herself, a radiologist specialised in diagnosing breast most cancers, and he or she had entry to top-tier medical establishments – and but her healthcare journey was a nightmare.

“I needed to begin an organization to assist folks, and I found healthcare advocates and noticed how good they had been. What actually struck me was that I used to be speaking to sufferers who labored with healthcare advocates, and so they mentioned, ‘I actually had an incredible expertise with the American healthcare system,’ which is one thing you do not hear fairly often,” he famous.

The aim behind Solace is easy: join extra folks with healthcare advocates. These advocates assist with duties similar to scheduling appointments, discovering in-network suppliers, understanding insurance coverage protection and payments, and coordinating care amongst a number of medical doctors, Gurewitz explains. And so they really do a lot of the work on behalf of the affected person, reasonably than merely telling sufferers what steps to take subsequent.

Gurewitz described this as a “no homework” ethos – a purposeful departure from navigation companies that overwhelm customers with to-do lists. Whereas there are lots of healthcare navigation corporations on the market, similar to Transcarent and Quantum Well being, he argued that appearing straight for sufferers will be the solely solution to transfer ahead in a system that’s already exhausting to navigate.

The service is roofed by Medicare and most Medicare Benefit plans nationwide, which means most customers pay little to nothing out of pocket, Gurewitz mentioned.

As a part of the consumption course of, sufferers meet with a doctor on the platform, who confirms their prognosis and helps decide how Solace can assist their care – a step Gurewitz says is important for each medical oversight and to satisfy regulatory necessities related to Medicare protection.

From there, sufferers are related to their advocate, who works with them by way of textual content, cellphone calls or video visits embedded straight into the platform. Solace works with sufferers who face every part from primary accessibility points – similar to discovering obtainable main care physicians or specialists – to far more complicated conditions involving power illnesses, entry to medicines and high-stakes therapy selections.

In probably the most critical circumstances, attorneys assist sufferers navigate critical bureaucratic failures, Gurewitz identified. He recalled a case by which a affected person got here to Solace after being wrongly faraway from an organ transplant checklist. Attributable to a kidney transplant, the affected person joked that they “could not wait to have a beer after this was throughout.” The nurse wrote of their chart that they had been alcoholics, and so they had been taken off the checklist.

“How do you even start to wish to method that? So that they got here to Solace and labored with an lawyer to undergo this very cumbersome course of to vary the hospital map. As soon as the map was modified, that was only the start,” Gurewitz defined.

After the file was corrected, the lawyer needed to work with the Nationwide Organ Transplant Registry to get the affected person again on the transplant checklist. Though the sufferers had been finally added again, they had been positioned on the very finish of the checklist regardless of having waited for years – a positioning that didn’t precisely mirror their medical historical past or urgency.

Over the course of roughly three months, the lawyer continued to work with the registry to appropriate the affected person’s placement, submit documentation, contact directors, and push to make sure the case was correctly reviewed. Gurewitz identified that this course of would have been practically inconceivable for many sufferers to navigate independently whereas critically unwell.

He mentioned the corporate is focusing on a potential IPO in 2028 because it seems to be to proceed increasing its attain.

Photograph: Helen Alderton, Getty Photographs