Guy Friedman is a Co-Founder and serves as CEO and president at SteadyMD, a provider of telehealth experiences for digital healthcare companies, labs, pharmacies, large employers, and other healthcare innovators. The company offers a 50-state clinician workforce and clinical operations. Since 2016, SteadyMD has raised an estimated $35 million in funding from Lux Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, Next Ventures, and other investors.
Launched as a direct-to-consumer virtual primary care product, SteadyMD focused on creating a dedicated relationship between a primary care doctors and their patients, allowing patients to pay a monthly fee and get unlimited access to the clinician.
Having built the infrastructure for online telehealth with all the regulatory issues behind them and the clinical protocols to do prescriptions, labs and referrals in all 50 states and geographies got the attention of others.
“We had built that to run our own business, and I like to say word got out,” Friedman says. “Other digital health companies started to call us and ask us if we had the ability to lend our clinicians to their platform. We briefly experimented with that in Q1, Q2 of 2020 and quickly realized, based on a flood of demand, that this was going to be a huge product. We got a lot of signals from the market that this was going to be a monster.”
In late 2020, Friedman and his team pivoted the business to the idea of being a 50-state, on-demand network for other digital health companies.
Friedman said they had raised $10 million before COVID, but the explosion of virtual health offerings made the company much more valuable.
“It was like hockey stick growth in 2020,” Friedmans says. “I did more revenue in Q4 of 2020 than I did in the previous 18 months. It was a very unique time where COVID created a bit of a frenzy in digital health, and we had really good numbers, so it made fundraising a lot easier.”
Friedman is excited for the future of SteadyMD.
“I see us as a generational company that can power basically the entire digital health industry,” Friedmans says. “Every single appointment in digital health eventually resolves to a clinician and it's very difficult to make that happen and we can help with that. We're going to continue doing what we're doing, really refining, the team, the sales, the product, the tech and trying to be like the Imminent player in this one part of the space and hopefully create a home for the clinician that they love while powering the whole industry in building a great business.”
Friedman spoke on the Smart Business Dealmakers Podcast about SteadyMD, things that make fundraising easier, and how iteration and believing in your product make for a successful venture.
