Curve Health Wraps $12M Funding Round

Curve Health raised $12 million in its latest Series A funding round, as the leaders behind the senior care technology platform have plans for significant growth in the next year.

Curve Health’s platform includes telemedicine, health information exchange, data and predictive analytics and billing integrations, with the goal of avoiding unnecessary hospital trips and improving skilled nursing facilities’ bottom lines.

Curve, which currently partners with more than 24 facilities, has a presence in Minnesota, New York, California and Massachusetts.

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Rob MacNaughton, Curve’s CEO, told Skilled Nursing News that given the funding influx, the company has the ability to scale up to all 50 states by the end of the year.

“Those [existing] partnerships represent the opportunity to grow into literally hundreds [of facilities] in the coming months, and so that’s why we’re so excited. That’s really the key driver, the catalyst of our Series A raise is to capitalize on that go to market traction,” MacNaughton told SNN.

The funding round was led by Morningside Ventures. Stephen Bruso of Morningside said in a news release that “Curve’s platform enables scalable, effective, and affordable provisioning of care for residents in nursing facilities nationwide.”

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Long-term care operator Recover-Care Healthcare were among the participants in the oversubscribed Series A round, as well as Alumni Ventures and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, IDEO, Inflect, Correlation Ventures, Rosecliff Venture Partners, Kapor Capital WTI and angel investor Ben Jealous.

Curve Health announced a $6 million seed funding round back in October 2020, as it was building on a platform developed by its founder’s previous company, the now-defunct skilled nursing telehealth provider Call9.

MacNaughton was also named CEO at that time. Curve founder Timothy Peck remains on the team as president and executive chair.

“We’re fortunate that we have a proven solution, and I think just given the confluence of factors of the last couple of years, skilled nursing facilities and long-term care companies and health systems in general, I think you’re more acutely aware of the need for better models in this space,” MacNaughton said.

Curve’s anticipated path for growth

Part of Curve’s plans for further development this year includes nearly tripling the size of the team in the next year, MacNaughton said. A key part of that growth is “investing heavily” into a role they call the “care traffic controller.”

While a remote employee, the care traffic controller is a credentialed nurse practitioner, EMT or paramedic.

“That individual does not direct the care but instead supports the relationship between the provider and the SNF bedside staff, “and helps them walk through workflow, technical, all those issues; we take that burden off of the skilled nursing bedside,” MacNaughton said.

The role is what MacNaughton considers a “key differentiator” in their tech enabled solution and others out in the market.

“So as we grow our SNF base, our CTCs grow in proportion to that,” he said.

As nursing homes continue to manage the current staffing shortage landscape, MacNaughton said the company’s tech platform is aimed at making nurses and caregivers more productive and efficient and their lives easier as well.

“It also drives better treatment based options for the patient and resident, which is fantastic and needed. And it’s also frankly better economics when you can treat in place,” he said. “It’s essentially letting [the nurses] do what they do better at the end of the day. We’re making them more efficient in a world in which those resources are becoming increasingly finite.”

Last July, Curve Health announced a partnership with California-based medical group CareConnectMD that delivers value-based care for nursing home residents via its high needs population direct contracting entities (DCEs).

MacNaughton said CareConnectMD’s connections to more than 360 SNFs in California and Arizona is another “incredibly important partnership and model for growth.”

CareConnectMD provides care to more than 360 SNFs in California and Arizona and the partnership is “an incredibly important partnership and model for growth as well.”

Nursing homes need to be in a position to care for a more complex patient population and technology like Curve’s is a way to do so, he added.

“The providers that take on the risk and manage the risk better, they will be the ones that thrive. They thrive only when there’s better health care outcomes,” he said.

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