YC-backed Brave Care raises $5 million for pediatric urgent care clinics

Brave Care, the YC-backed urgent care clinic for kids, has today announced the close of a $5 million seed round of funding.

The company graduated out of the recent batch of Y Combinator companies but sat out of demo day because this round was already oversubscribed, according to co-founder Darius Monsef .

Investors that participated in the round include Sesame Street (via their partnership with VC Collaborative Fund), Greycroft, Refactor and Fifty Years.

Portland-based Brave Care launched in July with the goal of creating a pediatric-focused urgent care clinic that could both serve companies and save them from spending thousands of dollars on visits to the emergency room.

In 2015, there were approximately 30 million pediatric emergency room visits in the United States — 96.7% of them were treat-and-release visits.

Brave Care wants to be there for parents and kids when the situation calls for something in-between their regular doctor and the emergency room.

The facility was built specifically for children. The waiting rooms are kid-friendly, the instruments in the patient rooms are kid-sized and the general philosophy behind Brave Care focuses on taking extra time to clarify the diagnosis and the treatment options clearly and patiently to parents.

The company also has plans to introduce a triage tool that walks parents through symptoms and helps them decide if they should head to an urgent care clinic or straight to the emergency room.

The funding will allow Brave Care to build out a new electronic health records system that would streamline check-in, foster communication with parents during and after a visit and help physicians and nurses spend more time focused on the patient and less time typing notes on their computers.

“We can’t build a tech-enabled health care business on someone else’s platform,” said Monsef.

Moreover, Brave Care will use the funding to open new, more lightweight facilities in the Portland area that can act as spokes to the main hub facility, where the company has expensive but not oft-used equipment like an X-ray machine or a full-service lab.