With the rise and telehealth and on-demand services during the pandemic, concierge health care delivery startup CourMed has found itself positioned to take off.
By Kevin Cummings – NTX Inno Staff Writer
Mar 26, 2021, 10:30am EDT
For Small Business, Big Mission IV, we used a SWOT analysis — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats — to take a look at North Texas’ business climate.
STRENGTH – Two trends have emerged from the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns: telemedicine and on-demand delivery. While CourMed, a health care delivery startup was founded in 2018, it has now found itself positioned to take off. Over the past year, the company has used its position to bring on a number of new employees, launch new services and expand its headquarters in McKinney. And with continued growth projected, CourMed is eyeing a liquidity event and a VC funding raise. The company also has hopes of expanding its services nationwide.
Like the words “social distancing” and “pandemic,” “telehealth” has also become a normal part of peoples’ lexicons. And this year, McKinney-based CourMed, which crowdsources the delivery of health care products, has seen some of the windfall from that.
While some businesses have struggled due to financial uncertainty or lockdown measures, on-demand health care delivery seems tailor-made for the times. CourMed has seen that. In the 2019-20 year, the company saw its revenue grow 300 percent year-over-year, and in 2020, founder Derrick Miles said it saw about five times the growth from the previous year.
“Now that people are at home, they have been accustomed to the Amazon delivery,” Miles said. “With health care, which is traditionally 10 years behind the cutting edge, people are becoming more accustomed to health care products being delivered to their home.” Products like prescriptions, high-end vitamins, supplements, CBD Oil, Immunonutrition drinks, J&J COVID-19 vaccine and infusion therapies.
CourMed got its start in 2018 with a community pharmacy under McKesson. Since then, it has gained traction through accelerator programs, including Capital Factory’s VIP Accelerator, Microsoft for Startups and Google for Startups, that later of which invested $300,000 in four local DFW startups through a newly created fund.
The company also recently moved into a new HQ after landing grant funding through the McKinney EDC’s Innovation Fund, which will help it add 22 new positions to its 13-person team to support its organic growth of more than 2400 available drivers.
Miles said the pandemic has sped up the adoption of on-demand service both for customers and health care providers. To keep on top of trends, CourMed has recently launched new verticals, including a prescription savings card called the EnCOURage card, as well as a concierge community pharmacy marketing service.
“Our participation with Microsoft and Google for Startups has taught us to create multiple verticals so we’re not a one-trick pony,” Miles said.
Though the pandemic has boosted the virtual health care industry, Miles also attributes CourMed’s success to its team of advisors, which have deep roots in the traditional health care space. The company also recently brought on James Griffin, who runs local health care software startup Invene as a fractional CTO.
“They help us to be forward looking and to not strain our resources,” Miles said.
As it eyes future success, Miles said the company is prepared to start offering concierge delivery of the COVID-19 vaccine, in Phase 2 of the vaccine roll-out. He also said the company has had discussions of a liquidity event, in addition to a $2 million VC funding raise. And he hinted at a new partnership that will allow CourMed to “pop up” in cities across the country overnight.
“We started out as an innovative concierge delivery of healthcare products platform. Now, we have multiple verticals that we offer to our customers to add value to them,” Miles said. “We still want to complete our playbook so that when we blitz-scale, we just plug and play.”
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