Michelle Carnahan has spent the better part of the last three decades working in healthcare at companies like Thirty Madison and Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY). Now, the entrepreneur has raised $52 million in seed money for her own startup, Arbiter, a platform that connects health care professionals and payers to provide better patient care.
The money has all been raised from family offices, including TriEdge Investments, MFO Ventures, and WindRose Health Investors, according to the company's funding announcement. Their investments give Arbiter a $400 million valuation.
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Building on years of experience
Following a 26-year tenure at Eli Lilly, Carnahan left big pharma for virtual care company Thirty Madison in 2020. She served as the company's president during the 2021 venture capital boom and was instrumental in helping the business attain its $1 billion valuation.
In September, Thirty Madison was acquired by Remedy Meds in a $500 million all-stock deal.
Despite witnessing firsthand the boom and bust of venture capital money, Carnahan told Business Insider she didn't intentionally set out to build Arbiter without it. That decision came from a desire to partner with specialized investors who could help bring the product to market faster.
“This gives us not only a knowledge advantage, but a distribution advantage in partnerships that would take years to develop,” she said.
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Utilizing AI
Arbiter's goal is to unite payers, providers, and patients on an AI-powered platform that eliminates waste and improves patient care. The startup is only six months old, but Caarnahan told BI it is already live with more than 1,000 clinicians.
The support from family offices and the acquisition of data platform SecondWave Delivery Systems helped accelerate that path to market, she says.
SecondWave Delivery Systems was founded by MFO Ventures co-founder Erick Moskow in 2020. The software amalgamates patient data and evaluates that information for potential health risks in order to help doctors make better treatment decisions. It was a perfect match for Arbiter.
“Arbiter’s mission is nothing less than to rebuild the operating spine of U.S. healthcare,” Carnahan said in the funding announcement. “By aligning payers and providers around the needs of patients, we’re transforming healthcare from a fragmented set of parts into a connected system that works for everyone.”
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The healthcare orchestra
Carnahan expounded on her long-term vision for Arbiter to BI, including plans for future acquisitions.
While the company is building its own AI infrastructure, she told the outlet she wants to provide a solid data foundation first. So, she's looking for other platforms with a clear data strategy, like SecondWave's, to partner with.
“Everyone keeps building new instruments for the orchestra," Carnahan told BI. "There’s a prior auth tool here, an analytics dashboard there, but no one’s building the conductor. Arbiter is that conductor."
Over time, she also hopes to use Arbiter as a way to make healthcare more proactive and less reactive. Closing the gaps, she says, is simply the first step in making those changes.
"Healthcare fragmentation isn’t an abstract problem – it’s deeply human,” Arbiter board member and founder of VillageMD Clive Fields said in the company's funding announcement. “Every delay or missed connection represents a patient waiting for care that should already be underway. Arbiter is uniting the system around them, so care can move at the speed of need.”
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