H1, the 'LinkedIn for Doctors' with Data on 10 Million Physicians, Files for IPO Following $100M Series C Round

According to Forbes data, there are approximately 15 million physicians worldwide, and you can find detailed information on 10 million of them on the H1 platform, including their specialties, interests, ongoing research, published papers, publications, clinical trials, insurance claims, and social media mentions.

If you want to quickly identify influential physicians within a specific disease area, this platform can also leverage artificial intelligence to recognize leading experts in the designated field.

H1, the platform dubbed the “LinkedIn for Doctors,” recently announced that it has raised $100 million in Series C financing. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, with participation from Goldman Sachs, Flex Capital, IVP, Menlo Ventures, Transformation Capital, Lux Capital, and LeadEdge. The funds will be used to further expand H1’s global network of physicians, with a particular focus on expansion in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Data compiled from public sources; graphic by VCBeat.

Pauline Yang, a partner at Altimeter Capital, stated, “The healthcare industry lacks a genuine and reliable platform for medical professionals… The pandemic served as a wake-up call, highlighting the need to optimize operations and leverage software to enhance work efficiency.” She added, “From this perspective, I believe H1 is riding the wave of the times.”

H1, founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York City, known as the “Big Apple,” is a data platform connecting healthcare and life sciences professionals with companies. It aims to help life sciences companies, hospitals, academic medical centers, and health systems connect with vendors, addressing their pain points in identifying clinical research opportunities and locating industry experts.

H1 is often compared to LinkedIn because the two platforms share a similar user workflow: both allow users to create personalized professional profile pages based on their individual circumstances, with H1 specifically tailored for physicians and healthcare providers.

Capital is smart; it always flows toward the future. Why has this seemingly uncomplicated “LinkedIn for healthcare” attracted interest from Goldman Sachs and other investors? This article attempts to answer that question by examining the team, product, and commercial value.

H1 Co-founder and CEO Ariel Katz

Ariel Katz, a shy-looking post-90s male with double eyelids, has previously had a successful entrepreneurial experience.

That was during his junior year at Binghamton University, when he was considering pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience. While researching potential programs, he discovered that there was no centralized database available to help undergraduate students identify which programs were accepting doctoral candidates.

“Better to rely on oneself than on others.” Thus, the young and ambitious Katz, together with his friends, established the online platform Research Connection and launched a new product, Labspot.io. This platform facilitates students’ search for research opportunities while enabling faculty members to showcase their work and recruit young talent for their projects. This product concept bears similarities to that of H1, and this successful entrepreneurial experience later paved the way for the founding of H1.

In 2016, the company was acquired by the Jefferson Accelerator Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Ewing Kauffman Foundation for an undisclosed amount.

Following the completion of the transaction, Katz began planning a six-month trip to India, where he met Ian Sax through a mutual friend. The two hit it off immediately and co-founded H1.

H1 Co-Founder and President Ian Sax

His “entrepreneurial comrade-in-arms,” co-founder Ian Sax, appears relatively mysterious by comparison.

The man in the blue-and-white checkered shirt has a very simple LinkedIn profile and rarely appears in news conferences. From the limited information available, we learn that he worked at Shore Group, a U.S.-based cloud computing services company, for over 10 years, during which he served as CEO, possessing extensive management experience and technical expertise.

The two adopted a divide-and-conquer approach, each taking charge of distinct areas: Sax oversaw the data platform, while Katz managed other business functions, including sales, marketing, and finance. From the outset, they were committed to launching in the United States with the aim of expanding globally.

When discussing the company’s future development, Katz stated ambitiously, “Over the next decade, H1 will power every platform on the internet where you can find physician information.”

The founders are the helmsmen of the enterprise. The traits of the founders determine the character of the company. The combination of an ambitious young entrepreneur and a steady, mature leader enables H1’s “dual-wheel drive” strategy, allowing it to respond promptly and accurately target high-pain-point sectors while achieving steady, long-term progress in technology.

In addition, the company’s core management team, with the exception of Katz, possesses decades of technical and managerial experience across the technology, healthcare, and insurance and financial services sectors.

# H1 Core Leadership Team

H1 is positioned as a combination of PitchBook and Crunchbase in the healthcare sector.

“H1” derives its name from the “statistical performance of a true hypothesis” in scientific research. If an experiment is proven to be a new discovery, that hypothesis is designated as H1.

In an era where data fuels development, possessing vast amounts of precise, vertically specialized data is undoubtedly the key to unlocking a new world.

H1’s precise and professional healthcare ecosystem delivers significant value to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, insurers, and end consumers. Personnel from pharmaceutical firms, medical device manufacturers, and healthcare organizations can leverage H1 to search for, identify, and engage with the healthcare professionals most relevant to their products. Consumers, meanwhile, can locate specialist physicians in specific disease areas and access information on cutting-edge treatments.

H1 employed a diverse array of channels for initial data collection. They sourced information from public resources, such as hospital websites and state medical registries, and also purchased private datasets from health insurance companies and other providers.

Prior to the emergence of H1, pharmaceutical companies seeking information on key opinion leader (KOL) physicians in specific therapeutic areas typically had to engage consulting firms and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase physician lists. With H1, however, they need only acquire a software license to efficiently and accurately harvest the desired “fruit” from a vast landscape of physician data.

“H1 started spreading like wildfire,” Katz said. “Everyone who talked about it said there was no other similar product on the market.”

H1’s products include Explorer, Labspot, Trial Landscape, Carevoyance, and HCP Universe.

H1 Explorer is an “online resume platform” designed for healthcare professionals.H1’s official website states that Explorer holds profiles of over 10 million healthcare professionals (HCPs).

HCPs can create and modify their own profiles, using them as digital resumes to collaborate with stakeholders such as pharmaceutical companies, connect with industry KOLs, and access opportunities in research, speaking engagements, and clinical trials.

At first glance, it appears unremarkable and seems not much different from LinkedIn. ButWhen it comes to acquiring key personnel information, H1’s ingenuity is fully evident—H1 pre-creates personal profiles for healthcare professionals (HCPs) and automatically maintains comprehensive profiles that include work history, publications, conference data, clinical trials, and more. All that doctors, nurses, or other HCPs need to do is visit the relevant website, search for themselves, and verify and publish their profiles.

At first glance, H1 merely adds one extra step of pre-processing. However, this step is strategically significant, shifting the dynamic from passive to active and substantially increasing the onboarding rate of healthcare professionals (HCPs). People’s natural self-interest drives these professionals to search for their own profiles to see if they are included. If listed, they verify the accuracy of the description, update their information as needed, and publish it, thereby completing the onboarding process. If not listed, seeing colleagues and alumni already featured prompts them to take immediate action by creating their own profiles, thus also completing the onboarding process.

H1 Explorer provides healthcare professionals with a platform to share their stories and connects stakeholders across the entire healthcare ecosystem.

Labspot is primarily designed for faculty and students at medical schools,By leveraging digital tools to connect medical students with research opportunities and mentors, enabling shared access, coordination, and mentorship, the primary value lies in accelerating medical research programs.

The platform is similar to Research Connection, which Katz built during his first entrepreneurial venture, except that Labspot primarily targets medical students.

# H1 Trial LandscapeH1 Trial Landscape is designed to help pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other institutional platforms identify the optimal locations and investigators for specific trial types on a global scale.

HCP Universe is a database of global healthcare professionals.This platform enables healthcare organizations to establish and engage with healthcare providers.

Carevoyance empowers medical device distributors by targeting physicians across specialized disease areas.

According to data disclosed on the H1 official website, it provides information covering over 8 million researchers, physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and administrators from 70 countries and regions; 16,000 healthcare organizations; 160 million peer-reviewed publications (with citation counts); 350,000 clinical trials; 2 billion procedures; 3 billion diagnoses; and data from 700 medical associations, with daily updates.

In addition to its rich product offerings, H1 is capable of developing new product features in response to market changes. For instance, in November 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued new guidance on enhancing diversity in clinical trial populations. Shortly thereafter, the company rapidly launched features leveraging data from Medicare, Medicaid, and other sources to provide demographic information on patients seen by individual physicians.

In terms of commercialization, H1 serves clients across 84 countries and regions, currently boasting more than 100 clients including Novartis, AstraZeneca, and UCSF. The company had 400 employees worldwide in the first half of the year, with revenue growth exceeding 250% in 2021.

A number of domestic internet healthcare companies are also capitalizing on physician data; VCBeat provides a brief overview here.If you would like your company to be featured, please feel free to add the author’s WeChat at the end of the article.

DXYDingxiangyuan is a leading digital health and medical technology enterprise in China, connecting doctors, researchers, patients, hospitals, biopharmaceutical companies, and insurance enterprises through professional and authoritative content sharing and interaction, comprehensive accumulation of medical data, and high-quality digital medical services. In December 2020, Dingxiangyuan completed a $500 million financing round.

WeDoctorFounded in 2010 and headquartered in Hangzhou, WeDoctor is an internationally leading intelligent digital health platform. Its core business spans healthcare services, pharmaceuticals, medical testing, and health insurance. WeDoctor Cloud is dedicated to building the digital and intelligent infrastructure for the healthcare industry, providing governments, medical institutions, physicians, and healthcare enterprises with dozens of smart healthcare cloud and medical AI solutions. These include internet hospitals, online medical consortia, family doctor contracting, intelligent tiered diagnosis and treatment, AI-assisted clinical decision support, cloud pharmacies, digital centralized pharmaceutical procurement, and intelligent health insurance cost control, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of China’s healthcare service system.

MedSciMedSci is a comprehensive internet platform for physicians that leverages big data and artificial intelligence to connect doctors, patients, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and other stakeholders, providing precise digital medical communication solutions. MedSci’s core offerings include digital medical communication and digital clinical research, spanning categories such as clinical research, physician professional development, multi-channel academic dissemination, and smart healthcare. In the realm of digital clinical research, it delivers end-to-end solutions that reduce costs and enhance quality through digital technologies. In digital medical communication, it provides specialized digital medical content along with precise, integrated communication strategies to accurately deliver the latest technologies and knowledge to target physicians.

References:

1. H1 Official Website

2. forbes<InnovationRx: Overdose Death High; Plus $100M For Doctor Data>

3. <H1 launches online platform for healthcare professionals>

4. <H1 Insights is giving the healthcare industry the ultimate professional database>