Why We Invested In ShiftRx -- Helping With The Pharmacy Workforce

Excited to be investing in the $3.5M seed of ShiftRx alongside Workbench Ventures and Inflect Health. Tau Ventures is an AI-first fund in Silicon Valley investing primarily in mature seed, typically when there is a pipeline of customers.?

ShiftRx is a platform leveraging AI to solve for the labor shortage in the healthcare industry. Their work is focused on automating the administrative backend tasks such as sourcing, onboarding, credentialing, scheduling, and billing for healthcare providers. Their initial focus has begun in the pharmacy industry, working to fill the staffing gaps with pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. ShiftRx uniquely utilizes generative AI to create onboarding modules for temporary providers integrating into new clinical workflows – this allows for providers to arrive pre-trained on everything from attire to EHR/EMR systems. Streamlining the staffing process not only solves staffing bottlenecks in pharmacy labor, but can eventually be scaled upstream in the patient care journey towards relieving permanent provider workload to result in better patient outcomes.?

1) The Team

We are excited to back both Autumn-Kyoko Cushman and Leann Haddad who have a great vision for the industry backed by their deep knowledge and insights from their respective backgrounds. Autumn started her career as a Hospital Corpsman in the US Navy, consulted with Deloitte, The National Institute of Health (NCI / NIH), IBM’s Watson Health, and Merative. Leann began her career as a Certified Pharmacy Technician (CPhT) with CVS Health, and spent time managing MTM teams at Evolent Health, with a background in staffing operations and team acquisitions.?

2) The Market

ShiftRx serves as a unified source of a largely fragmented pharmacy labor force that is highly in demand. Their low acquisition cost in recruiting pharmacists and technicians, as well as their robust pipeline of SMB + enterprise customers, is an indicator of a dislocated market ripe for disruption and immense scalable demand in just a few months of being operational.

3) The Competitive Advantage

ShiftRx’s competitive advantage is being one of the first movers in this space and their continuous advantage will lie in being a sticky product on the enterprise side, while simultaneously building out a robust labor network through building trust and protection for individual healthcare gig workers over time. We are excited about ShiftRx’s fresh insights on seamless payment integration on their pharmacy staffing platform on top of their shift matching capabilities. They currently operate in California and Texas, with plans to expand to Florida on August 24th.?

Primary author of this article is Sharon Huang , with support from Amit Garg . Originally published on “Data Driven Investor ," we are happy to syndicate on other platforms. These are purposely short articles focused on practical insights (we call it gl;dr -- good length; did read). Many of Amit’s writings are at https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/amgarg/detail/recent-activity/posts and he would be stoked if they get people interested enough in a topic to explore in further depth. If this article had useful insights for you, comment away and/or give a like on the article and on the Tau Ventures’ LinkedIn page , with due thanks for supporting our work. All opinions expressed here are our own.