Jan 5, 2018

Better Ventures Invests in Apostrophe to Scale Healthcare Access and Savings We are thrilled to announce our latest investment: Apostrophe ! Apostrophe is a Denver, CO-based healthtech startup that administers self-insured employer healthcare plans, making best practices available to employers while making high-quality care available to employees. We led the company’s $1.15M seed round, alongside co-investors TechStars and Royal Street Ventures. Apostrophe is addressing the underlying healthcare problems of high costs, extreme complexity and frustrating user experience. By standardizing and simplifying payments, they’re streamlining the patient experience and eliminating billing hassles while enabling providers to get paid promptly and in full. In their first six months, Apostrophe has already grown to 2,000 members in 20 rural school districts, saving the districts $250,000 in healthcare costs. The Apostrophe founding team brings a powerful combination of passion for changing healthcare and functional expertise – CEO Cheryl Kellond specializes in product management and launching new products, COO Julia Hutchins is an experienced healthcare executive who scaled a health plan in her prior role, and Kathy Keating is a seasoned technology executive and software engineer specializing in data and payment centric businesses. They are the epitome of what we look for in a mature, complete, mission-driven team. Together, this founding team has curated innovative best practices into a plug-n-play health plan that any self-insured employer can adopt, building healthier businesses, communities, and of course, people. Apostrophe believes that the best way to save money on healthcare is not to limit care and skimp on quality - it’s to provide the right care and the best quality. Working as an overlay to existing health plans or as a full replacement for a TPA and provider network, Apostrophe drastically reduces healthcare costs while delivering a benefit that employees love. Apostrophe provides customers a personalized 5-year plan that outlines how Apostrophe will hold healthcare spending flat or even reduce costs, and then ties compensation to performance. There are two ways to add Apostrophe to your health benefits: Apostrophe Essentials and Apostrophe 360. Apostrophe Essentials works as an overlay to an existing health plan. The platform integrates premium health care services previously only available to the largest employers, such as telemedicine, second opinions, and flat-rate surgeries. Apostrophe then combines the premium services with on-call healthcare concierge to guide employees, replacing existing health plans’ administrators with an advocate. Pricing deals are transparent, and employees will never receive confusing bills again.