Pre-AI era startups are generally getting little love from investors right now. But Ariel Katz, co-founder and CEO of nine-year-old healthcare data platform H1, argues that not all SaaS companies should be painted with the same broad brush.
“If you’re a workflow SaaS company, you could vibe code that,” he told TechCrunch. What AI cannot easily replicate, according to Katz, is a company that is a data provider at its core. H1’s business is built on selling detailed information about doctors to pharma companies, hospital systems, and health insurers.
“I don’t worry about Claude ever doing what we do,” Katz said, referring to Anthropic’s AI model. He believes the physician data H1 collects globally could be valuable enough to AI model makers that they are more likely to become customers than competitors.
CVS Health Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of CVS/Aetna, just led a $40 million round into H1. Katz said the startup wasn’t actively seeking capital — it turned cash flow and EBITDA profitable last year and is forecasting over 40% growth this year. The partnership with one of the largest healthcare companies in the world was simply hard to refuse, he said.
Despite strong financial fundamentals, companies like H1 have struggled to attract traditional VCs, who are currently focused on backing AI startups at high valuations. H1 was last valued at $750 million when it raised $100 million led by Altimeter Capital in November 2021, at the height of the Covid-era tech bubble. Like other companies that secured capital just before valuations fell in 2022, H1 has since focused on profitability and has grown partly through acquiring smaller competitors and complementary businesses.
Source: Healthcare data platform H1 raises $40M from CVS despite cooling SaaS market