Health-Tech Firm Olive Valued at $4 Billion After New Round

(Bloomberg) -- Olive, a digital-health startup looking to use technology to help health-care firms automate tasks, has closed a funding round that values it at $4 billion, about seven months after it was worth $1.5 billion.

The $400 million round was led by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners and Base10 Partners’ Advancement Initiative, according to a statement Thursday that confirmed an earlier Bloomberg News report. Existing investor Tiger Global Management also joined the round.

Columbus, Ohio-based Olive has raised $832 million in financing since March 2020 and about $902 million since it was founded in 2012. It was worth $1.5 billion after raising $225.5 million late last year.

The company plans to use the funds to develop more products and hire additional employees, with a goal of more than doubling its 800-person workforce this year.

Olive Chief Executive Officer Sean Lane said there’s $1 trillion of wasted spending in the health-care industry. He sees an opportunity for Olive to eliminate that by automating tasks normally done manually like ordering supplies, sending claims for approval or getting prior authorizations from insurance companies for X-rays or CT scans.

“We’ve talked about the trillion dollars of waste in health care -- our goal is to shift those resources to other areas,” Lane said in an interview. “We’re looking into global expansion and the applicability of our products across the whole planet. Our market is much larger than just a trillion dollars of waste in the U.S. It’s probably $4 to $5 trillion is the waste that we’re hoping to help automate.”

Lane said he sees potential for Olive to be to health-care what Amazon.com Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. were to the shopping and transportation industries. Eventually, he said, the goal is to create an internet for the sharing of health-care data. That project isn’t up and running yet.

Olive makes money by selling what he called a “common currency” to customers like health providers or insurers that can be cashed in for its products and services, which are sold on a subscription model.

Olive’s artificial intelligence technology is installed at more than 900 hospitals across the U.S., including 20 top health systems, according to the statement.

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