CVS Health Ventures helps Strive Health raise $166M

Strive Health, a digital health company focused on kidney care, closed a $166 million Series C funding round on Wednesday.

The round was led by venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates and included CVS Health Ventures. Strive has brought in around $386 million in venture funding since the company was founded in 2018.

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The Denver-based company aims to help patients navigate the care process of chronic and end-stage kidney disease. Strive uses a machine learning-enabled tech platform to pull patient, medication and claims data and create individualized care plans.

Strive co-founder and CEO Chris Riopelle said the latest funding round came in above the company’s initial expectations of what it planned to raise.

“We went beyond our plan,” Riopelle said. “[The funding] allows us an incremental cushion to continue to move our business toward profitability.”

CVS Health has already made investments into value-based care. Earlier this month, CVS closed its acquisition with value-based primary care provider Oak Street Health.

Riopelle said the round will help Strive Health scale entering new and expanding existing markets. He said it operates in 30 states serving around 80,000 patients through 550 employees, about two-thirds of which are clinical. Riopelle said it plans to add an additional 20,000 patients by the end of the year.

“We have a multibillion-dollar pipeline of opportunities in front of us,” Riopelle said. “There is a lot to go get.”

It also plans to use the funds to invest in partnerships with health systems, at-risk medical groups and health plans along with further developing its care model. 

Strive Health joins the list of digital health companies to receive a sizable funding round despite a challenging economic climate. In the first quarter, large deals paced much of the digital health sector’s funding activity. According to an April report from Rock Health, a research and digital health venture firm, funding for the first three months of 2023 funding totaled $3.4 billion across 132 total deals. Six mega deals with more than $100 million in funding accounted for 40% of this total. The six deals were from Monogram Health, ShiftKey, Paradigm, ShiftMed, Gravie and Vytalize Health.

Like Strive Health, Monogram Health serves kidney care patients, which has become a popular target for digital health disruption. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 15% of U.S. adults are estimated to have chronic kidney disease.