Carrick Capital Partners invests $50 million in InstaMed

Tom Paine

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InstaMed last month announced it had raised $50 million in funding, from San Francisco-based Carrick Capital Partners, that almost doubles its total raised to $126 million, according to CrunchBase.

InstaMed, based in Center City with its private cloud data center operations located in Newport Beach CA, processes healthcare payments including the payments consumers make for out-of-pocket medical expenses. It has over 200 employees, the vast majority in Philadelphia. The last revenue figure I saw cited was that it would do over $20 million in 2013.

Carrick is also an investor in Accolade, the Plymouth Meeting-based health concierge service, in the recent $70 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

I know of no direct connection between the Accolade and InstaMed investments, but certainly some of the logic was the same.

Andreessen Horowitz' Jeff Jordan noted in discussing his firm's investment in Accolade that the amount that employees have to contribute to their family coverage has increased by 83% in the past decade, from $2.7K to $5.0K.

In InstaMed's case, its real raison d'etre is helping individuals pay and manage their own or their families' healthcare spend, and the growth of that category is probably the biggest driver of InstaMed's growth.

The investment will be used to drive the growth of the InstaMed Network, accelerate go-to-market strategy and drive further innovation in healthcare payments technology, InstaMed said in a statement. "InstaMed’s solutions enable providers and payers to manage all of their healthcare payments on a single platform, integrated into any healthcare IT system. As consumer healthcare payment responsibility continues to soar, InstaMed’s innovative solutions offer ways for providers and payers to address the demands of consumerism while maintaining the highest levels of security and compliance."

InstaMed works with software vendors across the healthcare industry but has a particularly strong relationship with industry giant Epic. It also works closely with some of the major financial institutions.

The first investment in InstaMed dates back to 2005, and local investors include Josh Kopelman (from a personal fund), Osage Venture Partners, and Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Chis Seib, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, told me in an interview back in the Spring that investors have encouraged management to build for the long term rather than aim for a quicker exit. Seib represents the west coast wing of the company (he was an All-American water polo player in college), but back east InstaMed has multiple Penn connections, including CEO Bill Marvin.

On Seib's watch, InstaMed was a pioneer in relying on SaaS and (private) Cloud technology for managing sensitive information. InstaMed operates state of the art secure, redundant, geographically dispersed data centers. Yesterday, InstaMed said it is the first in Healthcare to achieve P2PE v2.0 validation.