The number of med-spas, weight-loss clinics, and concierge practices where patients pay a membership fee for direct, often same-day access to physicians, has exploded in recent years. But while patients pay for these services out-of-pocket, providers still often rely on software built for traditional, insurance-based care.
VITL, an 18-month-old startup, claims to be solving one of the sector’s biggest tech bottlenecks by building an e-prescribing platform — a digital tool for sending and managing prescriptions — tailored for cash-pay medical businesses.
On Wednesday, VITL announced a $7.5 million Series A funding round led by SignalFire.
Founder and CEO Charlie Jordan built the Nashville-based company after realizing just how much time medical providers spend managing prescriptions for treatments not covered by insurance.
Many providers still rely on faxes or phone calls to send prescriptions to compounding pharmacies, which create custom medications to order, often without knowing the final cost to the patient or how long the order will take to fill. VITL’s platform fixes this by connecting clinics to a nationwide network of compounding pharmacies, offering real-time price comparisons and Amazon-style order tracking.
“We shorten the prescription time from several minutes down to a few seconds,” Jordan told TechCrunch.
For clinics that put in dozens of orders each day, that time savings adds up.
VITL estimates that its technology saves clients up to two full workdays per month by automating an otherwise cumbersome and opaque process.
Cash-pay providers are clearly seeing the value in VITL’s platform. A little over a year after its launch, the company reports onboarding more than 630 clinics and generating eight figures in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), meaning the company is on pace to bring in at least $10 million per year.
That said, 630 customers represents just a fraction of a market that includes tens of thousands of clinics across the U.S. As interest in GLP-1s –the class of drugs that includes Ozempic and Wegovy — peptides, and aesthetic procedures like Botox grows more mainstream, the number of cash-pay healthcare businesses is only set to expand.
VITL never pitched SignalFire, but the startup’s rapid growth caught its attention. That interest translated into a new, $7.5 million Series A led by the venture firm, which is known for using data and AI to identify breakout companies.
VITL competes partly with Surescripts, the industry’s e-prescribing pioneer, and with boutique clinic platforms like Jane Software, which bundle prescription features into their broader electronic health record (EHR) software. What sets VITL apart from these competitors, it says, is its singular focus on the workflow requirements of the cash-pay medical sector.