Category: Startups

Fabric is back at it again with its fifth acquisition in less than three years, picking up telehealth provider UCM Digital Health to round out its virtual care portfolio.

Here’s a look at Fabric’s M&A journey since launching in 2023 to tackle capacity constraints:

• May 2023 – Fabric nabs Zipnosis from Bright Health to expand into asynchronous care.
• Jan 2024 – Fabric scoops up GYANT to provide an AI-entry point to its services.
• June 2024 – Fabric acquires MeMD and its 30k payor/employer partners from Walmart.
• Sept 2024 – Fabric broadened its provider network by acquiring TeamHealth VirtualCare.
• Nov 2025 – Fabric leans in on payors and employers with UCM Digital Health.

End-to-end platforms are built brick-by-brick. Fabric got its start by bringing consumer mobile app experiences to the ER, but it’s quickly expanded into new verticals and use cases.

• The acquisition spree has grown Fabric into a comprehensive access and experience platform backed by its own medical group, which allows it to streamline virtual-first care for patients across the country.

Fabric’s Hybrid AI is the connective tissue. It automates routine processes to make all the M&A pieces fit together, while also streamlining care coordination and clinical decision support to make its providers more efficient. 

• By reducing provider work time to just 89 seconds for asynchronous visits, Fabric enables faster treatments for patients and saves payors up to $17 per member per month – all while maintaining outcomes on par with in-person care.

What’s the end result? Salvaging MeMD from the rubble of Walmart’s telehealth business already gave Fabric a strong foothold in the payor/employer market, and UCM will deepen its impact.

• UCM adds another 400 payor and employer customers to the mix. They’ll transition to the Fabric platform and reap the benefits of its national provider network and polished patient experiences.

• That brings Fabric’s total client roster to over 75 health systems, 30k employers, and more than 100M lives across all 50 states. Not too shabby for a startup still looking forward to its third birthday.

The Takeaway

Fabric’s been acquiring and integrating new platform capabilities as fast as any digital health company out there, and the “buy-and-build” approach definitely seems to be working. They might be spinning a lot of plates, but they haven’t dropped one yet.

Rising tides lift all boats, and the venture-backed surge in AI startups just helped boost Hippocratic AI’s valuation to $3.5B on the back of $126M in Series C funding.

Do no harm. Hippocratic’s “safety-focused” AI agents perform almost any low-risk, patient-facing task under the sun. 

• That includes appointment scheduling, patient intake history, SDOH surveys, health risk assessments, post-discharge outreach, and even chronic condition management.

• They don’t diagnose patients or prescribe medications… at least not yet.

The Polaris Safety Constellation Architecture makes it all possible. Hippocratic’s healthcare LLM constellation leverages multiple specialized models that “double-check the primary model to ensure accuracy and safety.”

• The company then performs output testing, human evaluations, and cross-validations to make sure its models’ real-world performance lives up to their simulated testing.

• Hippocratic layers the safety talk on thick in its messaging, which is probably a decent idea considering the early pushback it received for replacing human workers and some past lawsuits.

Hippocratic is moving quickly. In just 15 months since commercialization, it’s established partnerships with over 50 major health systems, payors, and pharma clients in six countries.

• Many of those health system partners have also become investors after being “very impressed” on the safety front, including Universal Health Services, Cincinnati Children’s, and WellSpan Health.

• The AI agents have already expanded to more than 1,000 use cases and completed upwards of 115M patient interactions – with no reported safety issues.

The nine-figure round sets the tone for the next chapter. Hippocratic earmarked the funding to usher in an “era of abundance” that healthcare has never seen before.

• At the tactical level, that will involve fueling expansion through mergers and acquisitions, accelerating product development, and leaning in on international growth.

The Takeaway

Whether business makes bubbles or bubbles make business, raising another $143M from industry insiders makes it seem like business is booming at Hippocratic AI.

It never hurts to be at the right place at the right time, and Medicaid navigation platform Fortuna Health just landed $18M of Series A funding in the wake of one of the biggest shakeups the safety net coverage program has ever seen.

Medicaid is complicated. Each of the 56 Medicaid programs in the U.S. has its own evolving eligibility rules, documentation standards, and renewal timelines – none of which are easy for anyone to keep track of.

• Fortuna consolidates these programs into a single interface for patients and members, allowing them to manage their eligibility and applications while getting guided through the obstacle course.

• For anyone with some time to spare for an exhaustive overview of Fortuna and the broader Medicaid market, look no further than HTN’s stellar interview with CEO Nikita Singareddy.

“TurboTax for Medicaid.” That’s the basic pitch to Fortuna’s payor and provider customers. 

• Managed care plans and payors get a way to offload backend compliance work and “become invaluable to their members” by putting a Medicaid navigator in their pocket.

• Health systems and other provider orgs get a way to maximize revenue / retention by helping more patients get (and stay) enrolled in Medicaid or navigate their way to financial support from partners like Cedar.

Over 71M people are currently covered by Medicaid, and One Big Beautiful Bill just reshuffled the rulebook for all of them.

• OBBB includes roughly $1T in cuts to safety net coverage, as well as new proof-of-work restrictions, documentation requirements, and more frequent eligibility checks.

• The CBO expects 10M people to lose coverage by 2034 as a result, and Fortuna plans to use its Series A to scale nationwide (it’s currently in 10 states) and invest in AI features that will help respond to the policy shifts.

The Takeaway

As long as Medicaid exists, there’s a place for software that makes enrolling easier. Medicaid infrastructure is long overdue for a healthy dose of AI modernization, and an extra $18M certainly won’t hurt Fortuna’s chances of being the company that makes it happen.