Silicon Valley software company LeanTaaS has closed a $40 million series C funding round from Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division.
The Santa Clara, California-based company uses lean business processes, predictive analytics and machine learning to optimize healthcare operations such as infusion centers and operating rooms.
The investment by Goldman Sachs is in addition to the $61 million previously invested by Insight Partners over the three prior funding rounds beginning in November 2017. In the past year, the company has raised a total of $101 million.
Mohan Giridharadas, a Stanford graduate and former McKinsey & Company partner, founded the company in 2010 with the aim of using lean principles and analytics to solve problems like resource utilization in healthcare. "Lean" refers to business principles originally applied to manufacturing processes, but the business practices are now used across industries, including healthcare, to reduce costs while improving efficiency.
RELATED: Health tech funding snapshot—Google joins $50M round in Viz.ai, Augmedix raises $19M and more
A common challenge with healthcare in general, and cancer care in particular, is the peaks and valleys in patient appointment scheduling, which often results in inefficient use of scarce and expensive resources, unpredictable wait times for patients and overtime hours for staff.
LeanTaaS developed a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform called iQueue that uses optimization algorithms to match the demand for expensive healthcare resources—operating rooms, infusion chairs, ambulatory clinics, imaging assets, inpatient beds—with the availability of supply.
The software has helped increase patient access, decrease wait times, improve staff satisfaction, reduce healthcare delivery costs and improve operational performance, according to the company.
“LeanTaaS has developed a powerful prescriptive analytics platform that helps bend the access and cost curves in health systems, enabling customers to achieve tangible operational improvements,” Antoine Munfa, a managing director with Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division, said in a statement.
RELATED: Venture capital investment in AI and mental health startups surges in Q2: report
The iQueue for Infusion Centers software looks at daily appointment patterns, chair utilization and staff availability to suggest freely available appointment slots. It has been deployed at 180 infusion centers among many of the leading cancer institutions in the country. Many of these centers have increased capacity by 15% to 25% and reduced wait times by up to 50%, the company said.
At NewYork-Presbyterian Cancer Center, wait times for infusion patients have been reduced by 55% because resources are utilized more efficiently.
The company's operating room software has been deployed at 105 hospitals belonging to 24 different health systems. The solution unlocks OR capacity so that more cases can be performed in the same number of ORs without extending business hours.
MultiCare Health System reports that surgery patients are seen weeks earlier now because operating room minutes for surgeons and patients have been increased by 300%.
LeanTaaS will use the funding from Goldman Sachs to increase hiring in engineering, data science, product management, sales and marketing. LeanTaaS has nearly doubled the size of its team in 2019 by hiring more than 85 people in the last 10 months including leaders from Rally Health, GE Centricity, Epic, Cerner and Lehigh Valley Health Network.