This interview is the second in a series of conversations with leading digital health platform CEOs and investors. An abridged version of each interview was originally featured in Summit Health Advisors’ 2024 State of Healthcare Platforms Report. 

Anurati Mathur, co-founder and CEO at Sempre Health, spoke with Seth Joseph, Managing Director at Summit Health Advisors, about what it takes to scale one of the most innovative platform companies in healthcare—from attracting users to raising capital to overcoming competition. Sempre Health connects pharmaceutical companies and health plans to save patients money on their medications while improving adherence.

A Conversation with Anurati Mathur

Seth Joseph: What is the core problem Sempre is seeking to address? Why did you believe a platform business model was the best way to tackle the problem? 

Anurati Mathur: Sempre is improving the affordability of medications in the US by engaging the two stakeholders most closely involved in determining access - pharma manufacturers and health plans.

Platform businesses are ideal for aligning stakeholders and solving discovery & distribution inefficiencies within an existing system. As a two-sided marketplace, Sempre better and more effectively facilitates the distribution of existing affordability dollars from life sciences companies to patients searching for solutions, through their health plan as a channel.

By accelerating this matching of supply to demand, and engaging patients with a unique dynamic discount & SMS-based product, Sempre has driven 20%+ improvements in adherence, earned an average 95 Net Promoter Score, and added nearly 20 payers to the platform.

Seth Joseph: When first launching your platform, how did you attract your first users to the network? What strategies or tactics did you use? What worked? What didn’t?

Anurati Mathur: Sempre initially added life sciences companies & medications to the platform.  Quickly, we found this was not the right strategy, since this is also the side of the marketplace we monetize, so the standard for outcomes & scale was higher. You also can’t solve a distribution inefficiency without the distribution channel sufficiently in place. We then paused growth of that side and focused on attracting a few marquee health plans to our platform. This generated great outcomes for our early partners, case studies for the manufacturers we wanted to close, and experience at deploying our product nationally.

Additionally, payers naturally have a more regional vs. national lens in terms of scale expectations and more patience as early adopters, in particular because we are free of-cost to health plans. This ended up being the key to rapidly growing the number of covered lives on the Sempre platform, which in turn attracted life sciences companies at a greater pace, allowing us to accelerate the flywheel effect of Sempre.

Seth Joseph: In the early stages of growing a platform business, traditional business and financial success metrics can often be insufficient to assess the strength and potential of a network effects company. Did you face any challenges in raising capital over the years that you feel were unique for a platform business in healthcare?

Anurati Mathur: There are always investors that will and will not be a good fit for a particular company. In our case, not only are we in a heavily regulated industry, we are also a marketplace business, and one that involves two enterprise sales, so this mutually eliminated a number of investors from the start.

We were very fortunate to have found investors at every step of our 8-year journey to date who have taken the time to understand our approach and who have supported us in building the company through even the earliest stages, when we were growing much more slowly than today.

Platform businesses spend much longer in early stages before hitting escape velocity, and this forces a rigor around running the business in a capital-efficient way. This ethos, embedded throughout the team, has ultimately benefited us, particularly as we find ourselves in an economic market that more broadly values these fundamentals.

Seth Joseph: How has your platform model helped you enter and compete in the market? Has it served as an advantage or disadvantage when up against competitive threats?

Anurati Mathur: Sempre has proven differentiated outcomes to every stakeholder with whom we engage. We save patients ~65% on their out-of-pocket costs, and they recognize us with a 95 Net Promoter Score. We reinforce the health plan's formulary and enable access to high-value medications, while also reducing Emergency Department visits, as we recently published with UPMC in the Journal of Managed Care and Specialty Pharmacy. We improve adherence by, on average, 4 incremental fills in a 12 month period, and we engage with patients directly, which is important to our life sciences partners. 

As we serve more discounts, patients’ adherence & NPS further improves. This increases the attractiveness of Sempre to health plans. As we achieve more scale on the payer side, we continue to solve the copay support distribution problem for manufacturers in a cost-effective way. They invest more dollars in the platform, and our work continues. Once a flywheel like this is in motion, it’s difficult to disrupt, and we’re excited to continue building upon our market-leading position today.

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If you’re interested in other interviews in this conversation series with platform founders and investors, check out our recent Conversation with GoodRx’s Doug Hirsch.