I’m proud to announce that Flume has closed our $30M Series A from an incredible group of investors including Optum Ventures, Cigna Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Primary Ventures, Route 66 Ventures, Accomplice, and ERA Remarkable Fund. We are also fortunate to bring an impressive group of angels to the team—many of whom built and scaled the healthcare businesses which inspired me to start Flume.
This is an awesome moment for us and a key milestone on our goal to become the operating system for every health plan in the country.
I want to quickly explain what that goal means, why it’s important, and what we’re doing with this funding round.
Flume’s core insight is that for Americans today, your health plan is more influential than your doctor in affecting health outcomes. Your plan dictates who’s in or out of network, what’s approved or denied, etc. Despite billions of dollars flowing into digital health solutions and providers, your experience is still only as good as your coverage.
Now, we believe this is changing. The best care delivery companies already understand the importance of the health plan and are actually starting to become plans themselves. They’re doing this for two simple reasons:
- Better Member Experience. By becoming a plan, providers can now control the end-to-end patient experience without fighting an insurer along the way.
- Better Risk. When they do this, companies can better take risk, which creates a strong business model for the best providers and further aligns their incentives with patient outcomes.
Today, any care delivery company making the leap into risk has to tackle massive operational complexity. They effectively become an insurance company, managing payments, benefit design, claims, eligibility, priorauths, reporting, compliance, etc. The list of responsibilities is long, and not only is there a high cost for getting it wrong, your customers rarely notice if you get it right.
That’s why we built Flume—to remove the burden of backend operations so health plans can focus on what really matters—care. We’re the first full-service operating platform for plans, replacing traditional Third Party Administrators (TPAs) with a single chassis that allows our customers to launch plans in months, scales as they add new members, and leverage data integrations and a sophisticated workflow engine to enable highly configured care models. Anybody with an idea for a novel health plan design can build it on Flume.
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The most exciting part for me is seeing the creative things our customers are doing with the platform. Every week we meet amazing new companies with a totally new take on what a health plan can do—new incentives, provider networks, advocacy models, etc. This wave of novel plans is getting incredibly specific around niche use cases, some even focusing on specific diseases. Keep pulling on that thread, and we’ll soon see the holy grail of health coverage—consumer choice amongst personalized plans. The winner in that world is the patient.
We raised this round for one simple reason: to prepare for a wave of new plans, each needing modern infrastructure to run on.
Some of those plans will be built by startups, others by incumbents (hospital systems and payers). That is why we are thrilled to work with two of the biggest scale payers: Optum Ventures and Cigna Ventures.
In this round we will be investing heavily in scaling our platform with features to support the next wave of use cases. I’m excited about what Flume is building, but perhaps even more excited to see what our customers will build on the platform!
We have many new openings on our team. If you’re interested in joining, I’d love to meet you! Drop me a line or apply directly on our careers page.
And if you have an idea for a new health plan—lets talk!
