Why Rick Rasansky sold Yorn along with COVID-19 screening spinout SymCheck

Center City’s SymCheck and its parent company, decade-old feedback platform Yorn, were acquired by CXL Health at the end of last year.

Yorn, based at 24th and Market streets, specializes in real-time feedback and engagement for healthcare, business and hospitality industries. Its platform help user organizations to understand and improve the patient or customer experience quickly. In 2020, the company created the SymCheck platform as a response to the pandemic. The platform allows for contactless health screenings in line with a region’s current COVID-19 criteria.

SymCheck is focused on serving the hospitality industry, including venue or event spaces. It’s been one of the industries hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, and one where health screenings and following local regulations was key to keeping workers safe, SymCheck CEO Rick Rasansky told Technical.ly.

The SymCheck platform allows for a guest or worker to use a series of QR codes for contactless check-in. Each venue or event will require different things, Rasansky said, like proof of vaccination, a negative COVID test or a run-through of possible symptoms, and all of that can be done through the platform.

“When COVID hit, we knew the platform and learnings from engaging patients at scale [with Yorn] could be used to gather symptom information,” he said.

The work evolving SymCheck’s web-based platform over the last year of the pandemic ultimately drew CLX Health to make a deal, as tech solutions for living life amid the pandemic are on the rise, Rasansky said. CXL’s cloud-based platform manages a COVID-19 testing ecosystem of physicians, clinics, hospitals, laboratories and consumers, and its leadership wanted to bring SymCheck’s screening abilities into the fray.

“As CLX Health continues to expand its compliance and testing capabilities to accommodate the surge levels we are experiencing today, symptom surveillance and reporting integrated with testing is crucial to comprehensive pandemic response management,” said Glenn Field, founder of CLX Health, in a statement. “Under Rick’s leadership, SymCheck has established itself as a pioneer in real-time health screening for entertainment and live events and we anticipate bolstering our core offering with SymCheck’s proven platform and frictionless consumer access, further expanding our footprint in modern healthcare.”

The acquisition includes both SymCheck and Yorn, Rasansky said, and the team of about 10 people will all move under the CXL umbrella. Rasansky was named as the chief strategy officer of SiriusIQ, CLX Health’s parent company. He said there were a few factors in making the deal feel like the right move.

“SymCheck was really founded on the premises that we wanted to build a platform that could help people and make them feel safe, while being a positive influence on restarting the economy,” the CEO said. “We know health safety will remain for a long time. We also know there’s a lot of players in this space, we knew we needed to partner with someone who could give us a larger footprint.”

The deal was finalized on Dec. 29, 2021. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.