San Diego-based startup Turquoise Health closed a $40 million Series C financing round on Tuesday, bringing the company’s overall fundraising total to $95 million.
The round was led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Adams Street Partners and Yosemite.
Turquoise, founded in 2020, originally built its business around collecting and analyzing price transparency data from hospital and payer disclosures. Providers used that data primarily for benchmarking and contract negotiations, said CEO Chris Severn.
With its new funding, the startup plans to move beyond analyzing healthcare prices and into facilitating the transactions themselves, he stated. The goal is to enable guaranteed upfront prices for patients while reducing administrative waste between payers and providers.
Severn described Turquoise’s mission as creating “healthcare transactions the way they should be.” To him, this means two big changes.
The first is that patients should know the price of care upfront — and it should be guaranteed, not an estimate. The other is that much of the administrative overhead involved in paying for healthcare — including disputes, manual reconciliation and paper-heavy processes — should disappear.
“We just don’t think that should exist. Really this is a new chapter of turning towards the transaction itself versus just taking the prices at face value,” Severn declared.
He highlighted Turquoise’s contract management platform as a major part of this strategy.
The platform allows providers and payers to manage all their negotiated agreements directly within one place. Because healthcare payment rules are encoded in those contracts, bringing them onto the platform makes it easier to standardize language and simplify how prices are calculated, Severn explained.
That, in turn, can make price transparency data cleaner and help patients see more reliable upfront prices, he added. Turquoise said more than 40 customers are already using the contract platform, including UNC Health and Loma Linda University Health.
Severn argued that many revenue cycle tools focus on identifying problems after claims are processed, such as denials or underpayments. He thinks Turquoise differentiates itself by tackling the core issue.
“Turquoise is unique is our focus on taking the waste attributed to a contract and actually working on making language better — versus a lot of companies in revenue cycle that just take the contract at face value and say, ‘Hey, these are your denials, these are the zero pays, this is where the system calculator broke.’ They’ll help you collect those denials, but they’re not looking at the root and saying, ‘We’ll help you fix that contract,’” Severn remarked.
Whether Turquoise can fully eliminate the administrative headaches it targets remains to be seen, but the startup is clearly betting on rethinking contracts as the way forward.
Investors appear to have faith in this bet.
“We have tracked Chris and the team since 2021 and are impressed by their ability to expand adoption simultaneously across providers, payers, employers and life sciences. Their platform doesn’t just provide data; it embeds transparency directly into the negotiation and payment workflows of the industry’s largest stakeholders,” said Vig Chandramouli, partner at Oak HC/FT.
Photo: F.J. Jimenez, Getty Images
