Reveleer is a healthcare technology company using natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to help health plans and risk-bearing providers build out their value-based care (VBC) programs and improve patient care. Said differently, they are using AI-native tech to automate the review of structured and unstructured patient data to identify opportunities for better diagnosis and missed interventions, with the ultimate goal of keeping them out of costly care settings.
The product works by leveraging proprietary tech and data sets to complete medical record retrieval and review. Reveleer’s differentiator is its ability to use AI and clinical algorithms to find data in even the trickiest places (disparate medical records, pharmacy and lab data, etc.) and distill it into insights, actions and reports for both customers and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Oak HC/FT invested in 2021, initially drawn to the company because of the growing customer demand for a comprehensive solution, existing customer base, strength of the leadership team, and strong corporate culture.
In those early days of exploring a partnership, we spent a lot of time with CEO Jay Ackerman, discussing how to help Reveleer get even more front-footed, through key hires, scaling the company, and strategic M&A. M&A can help an organization accelerate their product roadmap and expand market reach in a meaningful way. But, at Oak, we don’t believe that you can buy your way to a successful outcome; there are no shortcuts. You have to have a strategic platform with strong customer relationships and a distinct set of products. That won’t happen by slapping a bunch of companies together, you have to start with a strong platform and that is what we saw in Reveleer.
In 2021, we saw the combination of the Reveleer commercialized product and broad customer base as an ideal launch pad. Jay agreed – the company had a diversified customer base with a strong tech platform, but was overly focused on retrospective medical record review, missing critical elements needed for an end-to-end product. We had a shared vision for the opportunity in front of the company – strong, internal innovation and strategic expansion through acquisition that required capital and resources.
Oak’ssupport on this type of M&A build is customized to fit the needs of thecompany and leadership team. For Reveleer, we support coordinated efforts on prioritization and strategic fit. We also offered hands-on tactical support –particularly for the first deal – to help with sourcing, financial analysis, and technical diligence. Our talent and marketing teams are available to help with sourcing and asset assessment, and we always bring our network to bear, whether it is to help with vetting a company, an advisor to a CEO, or as a potential customer.
For the first acquisition, we worked with Reveleer to find strategic assets that align with their vision to build something differentiated, enduring and deeply impactful in the VBC market. Jay and team have approached the process with incredible foresight and humility – recognizing that they can’t do it all on their own and actively seeking out technology and peer leaders who have aligned goals. Finding assets that have alignment around the view of value generation, discipline of capital deployment, and are cultural fits has been paramount. Reveleer is not a place where heroes thrive. It’s a team-driven company and any team that joins needs to demonstrate that they understand teamwork and have built that culturally within their business.
The first acquisition, Dynamic Health Care Systems in 2022, was a tech play to help build out the full risk adjustment product. Although Dynamic was under capitalized and, at the time, subscale, they brought critical offerings to round out Reveleer’s vision for an end-to-end risk product. The acquisition ended up being transformational for the company.
While buying customers was not a part of the strategy, we underestimated the impact the addition of Dynamic to the Reveleer platform would have on the growth pipeline. Reveleer had a high NPS with existing customers - and they were eager to consider complimentary solutions, further validating the strategy to build out the most fulsome VBC product on the market. With the vendor consolidation going on in the payer market, Reveleer was missing out on opportunities because of the product limitations. M&A can be an accelerant – it can accelerate onboarding great talent, adding more customers, your product roadmap. Dynamic did that for the Reveleer team and gave us the conviction to keep pushing on the M&A strategy.
Since the first acquisition, Reveleer has added two additional assets – MDPortals and, most recently, Curation Health. Curation Health supports health plans and providers looking to move from fee-for-service to value-based care with a comprehensive prospective risk-adjustment program and tooling to support clinician decision-making at the point of care. The platform works by generating and stack-ranking actionableinsights and opportunities for care gap closures – all surfaced right in the EHR. From a synergistic perspective, Curation offers a novel electronic health record (EHR) integration for Reveleer, as well as clinical rules and post-visit workflows with minimal overlap with existing tech. Moreover, the current customer base for Curation allows Reveleer to access previously underpenetrated markets.
The M&A strategy for Reveleer continues to be about sourcing deals that fill product gaps and allow the Reveleer team to solve a more complete set of problems for its customers. And, we have learned a lot about how to take a longer-term view in how we build relationships with other CEOs and companies that might make sense for our platform. Importantly, the process of sourcing, diligencing and integrating has gotten easier and more replicable and efficient.
Overtime, we have been able to make the M&A process more efficient, too, by eliminating some costly resources (mainly consulting fees), pulling forward diligence partners who know the team and their process, developing playbooks for integration, and learning more about how to link tech into existing platform. We know that you always learn something with a tech integration – and the team uses every one to push themselves further in terms of product offering and excellence. Nothing will be perfect, but if you have a strong platform, you’re better able to identify and solve integration problems without it becoming existential.
From a structuring perspective, we believe that growth, specifically profitable growth, is the driver of the market. When thinking about the specifics of an acquisition, we want to recognize what has already been built by the company being acquired – and give them an opportunity to participate in the future growth and success of the combined organization. We’ve built the engine for repeatable success for this type of growth with our companies and we applaud Jay for being disciplined in how he thinks about these decisions – with an appreciation of the fact that we are all playing for the big win here. It’s about playing the long game.
ForReveleer, the M&A strategy has been a highly valuable value creation lever, particularly a consistent, long-term strategy was put in place. The business is now profitable and able to leverage debt for the M&A process, giving the business optionality in how it pursues new builds and how the acquisitions are structured. With a lower cost of capital, the business can run even faster at both growth and fulfilling its mission. Ultimately, this entire strategy has been in service of its clinical-first, value-based strategy. Through the continued expansion of the product, Reveleer has gone from being a company that helped its customer base look backwards to one that helps providers and payers look forward and take action at the point-of-care.