Amir Dan Rubin has had the success many healthcare executives dream about. The former CEO of One Medical grew the primary care chain to hundreds of locations and sold it last year to Amazon for $3.9 billion.
Now he’s using his expertise to back other health startups at his new venture firm, Healthier Capital, which launched earlier this year.
While some startups are bent on disrupting US healthcare by rebuilding it or sidestepping entrenched incumbents like big insurers and pharmacies, Rubin told Endpoints News he’s investing in companies that understand the current system and solve the needs of existing players, from consumers and employers to health systems and plans.
”I sometimes like to say they’re disruptive from within the ecosystem,” Rubin said of the startups he’s invested in. “If you understand the needs of those stakeholders, you can have more substantive, scaled impacts. And of course, we have FDA processes, we have CMS processes. If you’re naive to all those things, it’s harder to build big businesses.”
So far, Healthier Capital has invested in six startups. Among them are Amae Health, which provides care for severe mental illnesses; Ezra, a company providing full-body cancer screenings; and Medeloop, which uses AI to help speed up clinical research tasks.
The startups Rubin works with are focused on growing, albeit thoughtfully, he said. With interest rates higher, it’s no longer a “growth at all costs” environment, and more companies are thinking about their cash burn, he said, adding that a few of the companies in Healthier Capital’s portfolio are poised to break even on cash flow within the next year, he said.
“We’re not averse to things that might suck up cash,” he said, “but we certainly like things with high gross margins, high growth, that don’t necessarily need to suck up a lot of cash because the cost of capital has gone up.”