It’s no secret that tech-enabled healthcare platforms have witnessed an influx in patient volume since the onset of the pandemic. San Francisco-based healthtech company Carbon Health is no exception.
The company announced Tuesday that it secured $100 million in a Series C funding round to keep up with growing demand. Carbon Health has witnessed a sixfold increase in patient volume just over the last year, according to the company.
Carbon Health’s multichannel healthcare platform enables patients to access care options from a wide variety of access points, including clinics, pop-up sites, video and the company’s own mobile app. The additional capital will be used to help the company scale nationally.
It’s been a year of strong growth for the platform, which previously wrapped up a $28 million Series B in May. The new capital helped expand its clinic operations from seven to 27 locations across six states over the course of the past several months, according to the company.
Carbon Health’s team has grown as well. The company plans to continue an aggressive hiring effort in order to increase access to primary and urgent care and COVID-19 testing, and to create vaccine access points once available. In addition to recruiting additional medical staff, multiple roles are available in data science, design, engineering, sales and marketing.
The company plans to grow its clinic footprint to 1,500 locations across the United States by 2025, with a special focus on increasing access to care in healthcare deserts. Healthcare deserts are defined by the company as regions that are at least a 60-minute drive from a healthcare facility.
“A striking one in five counties in the U.S.s is a healthcare desert, and this year the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the profound effects of these disparities and weaknesses in our healthcare system,” Eren Bali, co-founder and CEO of Carbon Health, said in a statement.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Americans living in rural communities are at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19 for several reasons. Those living in rural areas tend to be older than those living in non-rural areas and have higher rates of underlying chronic disease. Health disparities in rural areas also disproportionately affect people of color.
“Our mission is to solve these problems — and with help from this investment, we can accelerate our plans to deliver accessible preventative and chronic illness care to close the healthcare gap in this country,” Bali continued.
After reporting more than 100,000 new coronavirus infections every day for the past seven days in a row, the U.S. is now nearing 10 million cases of the virus, according to data from the CDC.
Carbon Health has conducted over 400,000 COVID-19 tests to date, according to the company. Last month, the company also launched its first specialty-based initiative, a cross-disciplinary program that provides patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 with possible treatment methods and a suggested pathway to recovery.
“We founded Carbon Health to make high-quality healthcare accessible to everyone,” a spokesperson for the company said in an email to Built In. “The current pandemic has exposed the healthcare disparities that we have been working to solve, especially around access points to care and testing.”
The latest round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group.
