5 on Funding with Andrea Ippolito, Founder and CEO of SimpliFed

Welcome to 5 on Funding! This weekly newsletter asks venture-backed startups 5 detailed ways they plan to use the new funding to scale their companies.

Quick Facts About SimpliFed:

Company Description: SimpliFed is the telehealth platform democratizing access to baby feeding and breastfeeding services. By providing high-quality virtual care covered by insurance, the Ithaca, New York-based company envisions a world where every parent feels good about feeding their family – because baby feeding and breastfeeding is central to maternal and infant health.

Industry: Healthcare

Amount Raised: $6m Seed

What 5 things will you do with this funding?

Key Priority for Funding: People

1. Amplify Awareness and Marketing

“We want to increase awareness of these services to parents across the United States because it is their right to have access to it. This is top of the funnel for us.”

2. Grow Our Peer Allies Team

“We have a national network of lactation consultant providers. Something really unique about SimpliFed is that to complement our evidence-based providers, we have a position called SimpliFed peer allies. These are the virtual manifestation of the folks at the front desk. They do scheduling and provide reminders, but they're always so much more than that. They are a peer mom, most have given birth in the last five years, and they work to create a really positive, thoughtful experience. They meet you where you're at, they text you if you consent to that, of course. Once you're in our care, once we've acquired you as a customer and have the opportunity and privilege to serve you, then we gotta make sure that we're doing our part and providing evidence-based care that's very thoughtful.”

3. Solidifying Our Technology

“We need to ensure that our offering is super solid–technology-wise. We are a tech-enabled service. So we are focused on spending our funding on developing our full-stack developed product. So that's having a thoughtfully designed product with a great look and feel that's frictionless and usable. That also means having secure backend systems.”

4. Build Our Clinical Operations Infrastructure

“Clinical operations is all about having that clinical ops infrastructure to help support the whole care pathway. We have practice management systems and electronic medical record systems to document encounters with patients. This also means ensuring we have security and safety protocols in place, including billing systems and the backstage clinical operations to serve our providers.”

5. Develop Trusted Relationships with Health Plans and Health Systems

“A huge part of our platform is democratizing access to these services fully covered by health plans at no cost to families. So to do that, we need to have trusted relationships with health plans and health systems. We have a team of folks that do our payer contracts and lead our payer strategy, but also our health systems partnerships. To get new contracts and maintain our existing ones, we have account managers in place.”

About the Founder and CEO: Andrea Ippolito currently serves as the CEO and Founder of SimpliFed. Prior to joining Cornell, Andrea served as the Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Innovators Network within the VA Center for Innovation and served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow based out of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and General Services Administration. She was the Co-Founder of an innovative application that improves access to care called Smart Scheduling (acquired by athenahealth in 2016). She also previously served as the Co-Director of MIT Hacking Medicine, as an Innovation Specialist at the Brigham Innovation Hub and Product Innovation Manager at athenahealth. Ms. Ippolito completed her MS in Engineering & Management at MIT and engineering degrees at Cornell.