John Harthorne, Founder and Managing Partner of Two Lanterns Capital highlights two Massachusetts-based startups, Akooda and Basis.ai, that he finds impressive. Akooda is an operational intelligence platform for businesses and Basis.ai automates the prior authorization process for insurance companies and doctors. Both companies have talented teams and show growth potential, with Akooda receiving acquisition interest and Basis.ai partnering with pharmacies, insurers, and healthcare providers.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
MFN: What’s an example of a Massachusetts startup that you’ve invested in or started to work with, that you’re really excited about?
John Harthorne: One of those that’s a really phenomenal company doing well is called Akooda. The founder is just a really driven, ambitious, super talented guy, and very technically capable. What they do is essentially operational intelligence for businesses. Every business will have an org chart that says like, ‘This person is in charge of the development team. And, these are the head developers, and they’re working on these projects.’ It’s this kind of official hierarchy in the organization. But in practice, things typically don’t work that way. You have projects that span multiple groups, you have some people within a team that is spending much more time on a certain project and less on another, etc. And that stuff is not really easy to follow. And that makes it difficult, in many cases, to track time and know how profitable is a given project. Are you wasting time on a low-margin project, and spending not enough time on a high-margin, valuable client, etc? So what these guys do is all the internal communication channels, all the code repositories, Slack, email, texts, and everything else with privacy. Not tracking individual people and the content of what they’re saying, but tracking the flow of information, and who the sort of bottlenecks are within those chains of communication, to identify that, like, look, this person is not supposed to be working on this project. But everybody else on the project is communicating with them and asking them questions to facilitate their work. So they’re actually really spending 20% of their time helping with this other side project. And that’s not being captured in the timesheets, etc.
John Harthorne: Basis.ai is one that’s local, they came through the MassChallenge healthcare program. One of the major problems for insurance companies, doctors, and patients is this prior authorization. Probably everybody with a prescription has encountered this at some point. You get your prescription, and you go to CVS or wherever to get it filled. And they say, ‘Oh, I can’t fill this insurance requires prior authorization from your doctor’. And you’re like, literally, the doctor gave me the prescription that his name is on its sign. So isn’t that enough? Nope, they have to authorize it so your doctor has to have a statement saying this is the preferred drug. It’d this long, roundabout thing, and actually super expensive, because literally phone calls being placed, messages being left faxes being sent. It’s a really stupid and archaic system that you should be able to automate. And so Basis.AI has a technology to facilitate the automation of that, identifying where these problems are going to arise in advance, and then resolving them before it ever gets to the pharmacy level, etc. It’s still an early-stage company. They’ve had some acquisition interest already though, and they can work with pharmacies, they can work with insurers, they can work with healthcare providers, payers, etc. It’s a really great company, a super smart team. I think there’s a dozen in Massachusetts, but those are a couple.
