How a $40 Million Investment Feels to an Analytics Startup

How does it feel when your startup gets a $40 million investment? Pretty good, apparently.

Stuart Goldberg, MD, would know. He’s chief scientific officer and co-founder of Cota, which just scooped up that sum in a successful Series C round in February. At HIMSS 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada, Healthcare Analytics News™ caught up with Goldberg (and his colleague Andrew Pecora, MD) to ask how the mood was over at Cota’s offices.

Transcript: “I never thought this would be a real company, and now we're actually succeeding.”

As a startup living month-to-month, we thought we had something. We thought that there was a lot of value in health records and that could help really move healthcare in the right direction.

About 4 years ago, Blue Cross made a small investment in us to get us going. Last week, we just completed our Series C where we raised over $40 million from a variety of investors.

We had a nice party, I would say. We really enjoyed that moment when we heard that this was really going to go through. When you get a vote of confidence with investors putting in lots of money, it not only validates the mission but it actually tells you that you're really on the right track to changing the way we practice medicine.

I think that the mood in the room among the engineers, the nurses who look at charts, and the business development people really kicked up dramatically, because they knew that the vision that we had for the company was actually going to become a reality.

I’m still a practicing physician. I helped co-found this company because I had an idea in the mission of trying to help healthcare. I've never thought that this was really going to go anywhere as far as being a business.

So we're here at HIMSS at our booth, and one of the venture capitalists came by and started saying, “You know, we've been following your company, we think it's kind of an interesting idea. How much was the raise?

And I said “Well, we've raised a little over $40 million.” And he got a big frown and he said, “Hey, you're now over you know over my price tag.”

That's kind of neat because I never thought this would be a real company, and now we're actually succeeding and we have enough money that we're over the price tag of venture capitalists. It's kind of exciting to be in that situation, and hopefully we use that money well so that we say at another meeting, “Oh, well, we just sold for X billion, and we're really going to change healthcare.”