This morning, Vericred, a digital data company focused on the insurance and benefits space, announced a $23 million Series B funding round. Aquiline Technology Growth led the round with participation from Echo Health Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Guardian Strategic Ventures, Riverside Acceleration Capital, FCA Venture Partners and First Health Capital Partners.

The company, which was founded in 2014, closed its $5.5 million Series A round in 2017. According to CrunchBase. This latest infusion of cash brings the startup's total funding to $34.1 million.

WHAT IT DOES

The company has developed a suite of APIs that can be used across medical, life, dental, vision and other types of insurance. The service is able to help with power quoting, enrollment, member management and renewals.

Michael Levin, CEO and cofounder of Vericred, explained there are over a thousand carriers and carrier-like organizations in the world of healthcare insurance and benefits.

"What is missing is the in-between. There is very little connectivity, there are very few standards, and this creates a huge friction towards efficiency, towards transparency, towards innovation," Levin told MobiHealthNews. "So that's us. We're the middle. We're connecting and wiring up the space. So you can think of us as infrastructure, middleware, the pipes, the wiring connecting the health and benefits ecosystem."

The company is focused on creating data exchanges between various stakeholders.

"We don't build anything that is user-facing. It's all the plumbing. Our value proposition is rooted in the one-to-many, for both our carrier partners and our tech-side partners. There's just too many point solutions, or point integrations today. They are all different," Levin said.

"They are all complex, very complex. They all change too often, so the benefit our partners get on both sides is the value of a one-to-many – one entity with whom to integrate to get access to all the partners on the other side."

WHAT IT'S FOR

The company will pour the money into growing its team and building out its product line.

"We are right now 50 people going to 100, 125 people this time next year. So, where is that [funding] going? It's going into sales. It's going into marketing. It's going into engineering. It's all about creating value for our partners.

"So we are based in New York. We have offices in Omaha [Nebraska]. We will be recruiting in those locations. But, as most of us have over the last year, we have learned that we don't have to have everyone in the office.

"It's about building more connectivity. It's about improving our existing products and innovating and delivering to the market new products."

MARKET SNAPSHOT

This isn't the only company using APIs to help with data sharing. Madison, Wisconsin-based API company Redox landed $33 million in Series C funding in 2019 for its tool that helps healthcare organizations and developers connect.

APIs are being used in a variety of ways throughout healthcare. Several innovators are using APIs, to help doctors and patients get access to their records. For example, in 2019, CMS launched a new API that intended to help doctors access a patient's medical record.

More recently, DrChrono, the maker of an open, mobile-friendly EHR platform, launched an open FHIR API that enables the seamless transfer of patients' data from the company's OnPatient personal health record (PHR) to Apple Health, the iPhone-based PHR launched by the tech giant in 2018.