Health tech startup Color raises $100M at a $4.6B valuation

Health tech startup Color has raised $100 million in Series E funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $4.6 billion. This round means Color has now raised a total of $378 million, with this latest round specifically meant to help the company offer new programs that deliver the last mile of care across healthcare services.

The round was led by Kindred Ventures and by funds managed by T. Rowe Price, along with participation from existing investors including General Catalyst, Viking Global Investors, and Emerson Collective. In January, Color raised $167 million in Series D funding, at a valuation of $1.5 billion. This latest round triples that measure of the company’s worth.

Color’s software and infrastructure provide tools for preventative health and infectious disease management by making healthcare programs more accessible. To date, Color has partnered with almost 1,000 organizations, including public health departments, employers, and universities to help people get faster access to healthcare services. Its partners include Salesforce, the National Institutes of Health, the State of California, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and more. The company currently facilitates over 6,500 COVID-19 testing sites at offices and schools, and it also runs 500 vaccination sites across the country.

“What we have built will serve as a critical piece of public health infrastructure to deliver access to healthcare services to those who need them most,” said Color CEO Othman Laraki. “We have learned that there is an exponential uptick in people’s ability to use these services as they become simpler and more convenient. Public health should happen where public life happens.”

Ultimately, Color’s approach is to rethink healthcare delivery in order to make it accessible directly in people’s lives with low transaction costs in a way that’s scalable and doesn’t require a lot of clinical resourcing.

With this latest round of funding, Color aims to accelerate the expansion of accessible public health infrastructure by helping people get access to screening, diagnostics, and initial treatments for their health needs. Color’s offerings will now include vaccination and preventative health services for schools and employers. It also plans to offer infectious disease management programs in the future.

“Color has built a strong, sustainable, and profitable business that can scale alongside the myriad of health challenges the U.S. faces,” said Color CFO Mike Herring. “The response from our partners has been incredibly positive, and our remarkable team has delivered at scale with both pace and quality of execution.”

Laraki co-founded Color in 2013 based on his own experience. The company tells TechCrunch his grandmother passed away from breast cancer and that his mother is a breast cancer survivor. He himself is a carrier of a BRCA2 mutation, which can increase an individual’s risk for cancer. Finding out this unique risk was challenging for him and he believed that the entire experience felt like something that could have become a much simpler healthcare transaction. Laraki’s experience was the catalyst to building Color, which now aims to make healthcare programs more accessible and cost-effective.

The company says its combination of existing offerings and new services expands its efforts to build public health technology and infrastructure for governments, employers, and other institutions that care for large populations.