Healthcare transportation startup Roundtrip just raised $4M

In a banner year for healthtech companies, another fundraising announcement just arrived from four-year-old healthcare transportation company Roundtrip.

The company, which raised a $5 million series A last year and just received a $252,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant to conduct a study focused on patients with opioid use disorder, added a $4 million strategic capital raise to its total investment, the company said this week. The startup is the maker of an on-demand transportation platform for the healthcare space.

Previous investor Motley Fool Ventures doubled down on the company, participating alongside ZOLL Medical Corporation. UH Ventures, the innovation and commercialization division of University Hospitals Health System in Cleveland, and Grays Ferry Capital also joined the ranks of the company’s existing list of investors which included Johns Hopkins University and Ben Franklin Technology Partners. The company has now raised a total of $10.5 million.

The raise will support RoundTrip scaling geographically and specializing its sales, implementation and account management model, the company said, and will allow it to grow the Roundtrip Community — its online marketplace that streamlines medical transportation providers to rides requested by health systems and health plans.

“It is really encouraging to see companies like Roundtrip tackle and solve compliance and efficiency challenges in the non-emergent medical transport segment,”said ZOLL Data Systems President Alex Moghadam in a statement. “The impact that Roundtrip has had on reducing patient no-shows while increasing patient satisfaction has positioned them as the clear leader in the industry.”

Founder and CEO Mark Switaj said that during the pandemic, the funding has validated the company’s purpose.

“The future is in disease-state transportation solutions, and our outcomes-based view crosses COVID-19, the opioid crisis, cardiology, radiology, and cancer care, plus behavioral health and more,” Switaj said in a statement.

Roundtrip, currently based on North Fifth Street between Callowhill and Spring Garden streets, operates in the Northeast and in California on the West Coast, a company spokesperson said. These regions are home to Roundtrip’s largest accounts, but the raise will allow the company to add sales team members and expand in new U.S. markets with large health enterprises in both rural and urban areas. The company has added about 10 staffers since May.

While some are finding it challenging to fundraise for their ventures during the pandemic (and recession), Roundtrip CTO Ankit Mathur said that like most healthtech companies right now, the pandemic has pushed the 37-person team to live its mission and core values.

“In early March, we were able to pivot our product to address the needs of COVID-19-related medical transportation,” Mathur said. “We are so fortunate that the investment community sees first hand that we are the leader in the medical transportation space.”