Democratizing Care: Announcing our Investment in Counsel Health

Imagine you wake up with a concerning rash or upper abdominal pain. What are your options? If you live in a city, you could wait a month or more for the next available doctor’s appointment. If you live in a small town, that wait could be even longer and an hour plus drive away. Or, you could do what the insurance companies hope you don’t, and go to the ER. Instead, most of us resort to the internet, where an estimated billion+ of health-related searches are conducted every day. Your choices end up ranging among a long wait, sub-quality care or just attempting to self-diagnose… which, speaking from personal experience, often comes coupled with misinformation and an anxiety spiral. Even worse, it could mean delayed treatment of a real condition and avoidable medical bills. 

And it’s not just the patient experience that is suffering. Providers are under pressure facing a growing shortage of primary care providers (PCPs) due to burnout, job dissatisfaction, low compensation and an aging workforce. Meanwhile, payors continue to hike insurance premiums to keep up with the skyrocketing costs of care. 

Today, we are excited to announce our investment in Counsel Health. Counsel is democratizing access to high quality, tailored medical advice via a text-based care model delivered by AI-enabled physicians. When patients text a question, Counsel’s AI cockpit enables its in-house clinician team to provide superhuman medical advice that is near-instant, always available, hyper-personalized and up-to-date - incorporating all past conversations, medical history, patient preferences and latest medical guidelines. 

In the past, we have seen the important impacts of care setting shifts ranging from emergency medicine to telehealth as well as that of leveraging new technologies from SaaS to AI. Counsel’s vision incorporates all of the above and more: delivering care via the next setting frontier where it's most accessible for patients (message and phone-based) and applying the latest AI techniques and LLM advances to enable faster, more personalized and up to date care. It’s doing this while being physician-first, with a high quality, high empathy doctor in the loop. 

By owning the full-stack, asynchronous delivery service, Counsel is en route to building a truly durable care model that achieves the triple aims of improving the experience, quality and cost of care for all ecosystem players across patients, providers and payors. 

When we first met the founder/CEO, Muthu Alagappan, MD in the early days of shaping the vision for Counsel, a key thought he kept coming back to was how to provide everyone with the experience that he was able to provide his closest family and friends: that of having a doctor in the family. We were struck by his passion and unique founder-market fit with a combination of industry, functional and operational expertise having been an attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, UCSF and Beth Israel before becoming a tech operator in the space, most recently serving as Chief Medical Officer at Notable Health. Now, Counsel partners directly with national health plans and provider organizations to provide a “doctor in the family” experience to their patient populations. The service is available in the largest US markets including California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, and Texas, with plans to expand into all 50 states over the next two years.

We were thrilled to co-lead Counsel’s pre-seed alongside Floodgate and couldn’t be more excited to double down and be joined in our investment alongside the new lead seed investor, a16z, as well as Pear VC and Founders You Should Know. Muthu and the entire Counsel Health team (they're hiring) are building a future where everyone has access to high quality, personalized healthcare anytime, anywhere, and they are just getting started! 

Learn more about Counsel Health and their funding announcement here: 

Axios: Counsel Health Raises $11M Ahead of National Expansion 

STAT News: The Case for Asynchronous Medicine 

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Image credits: Counsel Health

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