Health tech startup Forus banked $150 million in series C funding as it aims to expand its artificial intelligence-powered network to more medical specialties and care settings.
The fresh funding comes just four months after the company announced it raised $160 million in a series B round. The latest funding round boosts Forus' valuation to $3 billion, tripling from its series B round in May, according to the company. Forus has raised more than $300 million to date.
Bain Capital Ventures, an investor in Forus since its seed round, led the latest round, with every existing institutional investor reinvesting, including Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Redpoint, BoxGroup, Pear VC, Vast Ventures and SV Angel.
Forus, formerly known as Tandem, automates prescription workflows with artificial intelligence. The startup built an AI-powered network that connects doctors, pharmacies, payers and biopharma to automate the path from prescription to patient. Forus' technology handles the tedious back-end administrative work that often creates friction points, making it harder for patients to get the medications they need. The company automates prior authorizations, appeals, financial assistance and pharmacy routing across different stakeholders. It's free for both doctors and patients to use.
The company, which launched three years ago, says it now has nationwide reach, used by thousands of medical practices and health systems in all 50 states. Forus now supports people in 85% of U.S. residential zip codes, including many patients with complex conditions, according to the company.
Forus initially launched in dermatology, and now more than a third of providers in that specialty across the country have adopted the platform, according to executives.
Sahir Jaggi, CEO and founder of Forus, told Fierce Healthcare in May that the company's focus is simple: "We're focused on helping people get access to medicine faster, easier and cheaper, most impactful for folks with high cost and complex conditions."
After dermatology, the company expanded into gastroenterology and autoimmune specialties. Forus inked a partnership with the American Gastroenterological Association to improve medication access for patients living with digestive diseases. The partnership pairs AGA's clinical leadership with Forus's medication access platform to help GI patients get faster access to the therapies their physicians prescribe.
"We have now started to enter a wide variety of other categories. Everything from oncology and cancer to neurology and supporting patients in those serious conditions, all the way through to primary care and metabolic health," Jaggi said in an interview on Tuesday.
The company aims to put its AI platform in every doctor's office in the country, Jaggi asserted.
"We have already been growing really quickly and seeing a tremendous amount of demand and need in the market from doctors and patients but also seeing real uptake and excitement from partners on the life sciences and biotech side," he said.
The new funding will accelerate Forus' expansion into new specialties and care settings, Jaggi said, "so that we can reach more providers and more patients over the next year or two."
"It also enables us to invest more aggressively in building out our team, adding more people to build the technology, adding more people to help us bring it to more patients and physicians," he added.
The company plans to more than double its headcount this year. Forus recently expanded beyond pharmacy-benefit drugs into buy-and-bill support.
About one-third of patients prescribed medications for high-cost or complex conditions never receive their first dose, and those who do can face lengthy delays. When prescribing a new therapy means uncertainty for the patient and an unmanageable process for the practice, physicians may opt for older, less effective therapies that are easier to obtain, leaving patients with more side effects and poorer outcomes.
Despite the enormous time and investment required to develop new medicines, many patients never benefit from those advances due to breakdowns in access and delivery, according to Forus.
"There were times a patient would come back after two or three months and tell me, 'I haven't even started the medication yet,'" Brinda Dixit, M.D., rheumatologist at Virginia Rheumatology Clinic in Chesapeake, Virginia, said in a statement. "With Forus, approvals for these medications come back in less than two days, and patients start treatment within a week or two. My patients are getting better faster because they are getting on therapy faster. It makes me a better physician."
A recent American Medical Association study found that physicians and their staff spend more than 13 hours per week on prior authorizations. Forus' technology aims to cut the administrative time it takes for a prescription to reach a patient, executives said.
The company says it gives every prescription its own AI agent. Embedded directly in provider workflows, the agents manage everything between a clinical decision and a patient starting treatment, navigating insurance, financial assistance and supply chain across every drug, payer, and pharmacy in the country.
Each agent works like a case manager, according to the company, reasoning through the patient’s medical history, insurance coverage and financial situation to determine what needs to happen next, drawing on clinical models, specialized sub-agents and what Forus has learned from millions of cases.
Family Allergy & Asthma reports that it reduced prior authorization turnaround from 7+ days to a median of 1.1 days, and cut nursing administrative workload by 70% by using Forus' platform. DOCS Dermatology Group says 80% more patients were accessing their medications after deploying Forus, with prior authorizations submitted same-day and approvals averaging under a day.
Biopharma companies also see value in Forus' AI platform. While AI is speeding up the discovery of new drug candidates, bringing those medicines to patients remains a lengthy, expensive process that can take more than a decade and billions of dollars, according to Jaggi.
"There's this huge gap between what science can achieve at the discovery layer and what's actually available to patients in an accessible way," he said. "We're able to partner with life science companies because we are offering our network as a way to accelerate medicine from discovery to treatment."
Forus uses its network and real-world data to identify where patients and providers encounter obstacles, monitor outcomes and adverse events, and help life sciences companies develop, launch and expand access to new treatments more effectively, he noted.
Forus is now working with nine of the top 15 global biopharma companies and many fast-growing biotechs to advance medicine.
"Over time, we can help them recruit the right patients for clinical trials, reach the physicians whose patients can benefit from those medicines, secure better coverage and distribution for their medicines, understand where adoption or access is breaking, as it's combining this real-time visibility into the system that is unprecedented today because we have the support of physicians across the country with connectivity across the full spectrum of players and ecosystems," Jagg said.
Forus is focused on supporting a broad range of disease areas, including oncology, cardiology, primary care and autoimmune conditions. The platform is also designed to work across all care settings, from clinics and infusion centers to inpatient and outpatient health systems, and across all medication types, including self-administered drugs and infused therapies.
"We want to make it so that the product is usable for 100% of providers and patients in the country for 100% of the medications they might need," Jaggi said.
The complexity of accessing certain drugs can also discourage practices from treating certain conditions altogether. Some provider practices hold back from treating entire disease areas because they don't feel equipped to take them on, according to the company.
A large urology group stopped treating certain conditions because managing the associated medications became too complex, forcing patients to seek care elsewhere, Jaggi noted. This can delay treatment, create access challenges and potentially worsen outcomes.
"The reason why we are so focused on making our product usable and effective across this wide spectrum of physicians, and the reason that we're taking investment to accelerate further is because every day that we don't have our platform in every doctor's office that could use it is another day that people are getting less effective treatment, less timely treatment and less clinical progress than they could based on the medicines that have already been invented," he said.
"Forus is becoming how new medicine reaches people in America," said Kevin Zhang, general partner at Bain Capital Ventures. "We have backed the company since its seed, and in that time the largest companies in medicine have turned to it to bring their newest medicines to patients. The next era of medicine will run on the AI-powered network Forus is building."