Austin-based home lab testing kit startup Everlywell is expanding its scope considerably with two acquisitions, and a transformation that includes the establishment of a new parent company led by Everlywell CEO and co-founder Julia Cheek. The new entity, called Everly Health, will now offer services including at-home lab testing kits and education, population-scale testing through a U.S.-wide clinician network, telehealth and a payer-supported/enterprise self-collected lab test.
This is a big move for Everlywell, which was founded in 2015 (and which was a finalist in TechCrunch’s 2016 Disrupt SF Battlefield completion). The company has steadily iterated on its offerings, expanding its at-home testing from fertility products to food sensitivities and allergies, and last year, to at-home COVID-19 test collection.
Everly Health’s business now includes not only that kind of at-home consumer diagnostic and personal health education, but also many relationships through PWNHealth, which will rebrand to Everly Health Solutions, with health plans, employers and labs across the U.S.
Everlywell itself was actually a longtime partner of PNWHealth, which is what Cheek told me an in interview actually helped make the acquisition make so much sense to both companies. They’d been working together for years, and that collaboration had only deepened in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“What we found over the last year was we were collaborating on all these different enterprise partnerships to offer solutions, and so our cultures are really well aligned, and our teams have worked closely together,” she said. “And we both share this common ethos that we felt the urgent need to help people and to save lives, but also this discipline around consumer-friendly and enabled care, grounded in diagnostics.”
Overall, Cheek said that the decision to go out and acquire the pieces of the puzzle needed to deliver a more comprehensive care offering was partly driven by the pandemic, but that really just drove an acceleration of what Everlywell was already beginning to see before COVID-19. Freshly capitalized with the $175 million it raised last December, the startup was in a position to make some bold moves in order to make the most of the moment.
“Before the pandemic, but especially during and looking out to post-pandemic, we have just seen this massive acceleration of the need for consumer friendly testing services,” she said. “Our business has continued to grow exponentially, even since normal doctor’s appointments resumed, orders of magnitude, 300% growth. We sat back and said, since we believe healthcare is in a watershed moment post-pandemic, where do we think we need to actually be able to offer a full-service diagnostic solution as this entire space grows. So it’s Everlywell as a consumer-friendly brand, but it’s also this massive enterprise need for home testing, and broader consumer diagnostics.”
The new acquisitions do add some complexity to Everly Health’s business, since its Everly Health Solutions also serves a number of customers that would be considered competitive with Everlywell. Cheek points out that both businesses have a demonstrated track record of security and data integrity, compliant with HIPAA standards, and says that they’re setting up a strict firewall that will result in “complete data independence” of Everly Health Solutions to ensure there’s no possibility of anti-competitive behavior.
The companies will however share customer experience, design and product resources, however, and the plan is to build a unified brand focused on high-quality customer engagement across the board.
Everly Health hasn’t released the financial details of the transaction, but it has shared shared that PWNHealth CEO Sanjay Pingle will be acting in a transitional role in the combined company for the time being, and will serve on the board of Everly Health. Investors in PWNHealth, including Spectrum Equity, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield corporate VC Blue Venture Fund will also retain an ownership stake in Everly Health.
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