Lockdowns associated with the pandemic drove an unprecedented explosion in the adoption of home healthcare across the country. With a growing senior population, the future of home healthcare is expected to continue growing with patients who have difficulty accessing traditional healthcare settings due to age, mobility limitations, or illness. The number of home healthcare provider businesses is increasing to support this demand. Axle Health is a scheduling and workforce management platform for home healthcare provider businesses. The platform cofounded by a former Uber employee, who worked on UberEats, seeks to optimize the logistics involved with routing and dispatch for home healthcare companies to ensure that they can maximize clinicians’ productivity and workloads by minimizing drive time. As a comprehensive and centralized solution, the platform also incorporates patient engagement, communications, mileage and location tracking, scheduling, as well as connectivity with common EMRs, CRMs, and HR solutions. Homecare providers, like the rest of the healthcare industry, experience high turnover rates with burnout and overwork cited as common causes. Axle hopes to play a small part in solving a large problem to ensure continuity in care within the home healthcare ecosystem.
LA TechWatch caught up with Axle Health CEO Adam Stansell to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the company’s total funding raised to $7M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$4.2M Seed from Pear VC, Y Combinator, Trac VC, and others.
Tell us about your product or service.
We make scheduling and workforce management software for home health care providers, to help them reduce their clinician drive time and see more patients per shift.
What inspired the start of Axle Health?
My background is in logistics tech, first at Uber and then at a company called Motive. During the 1st year of COVID, I realized that the healthcare space hadn’t adopted many logistics best practices that were common in other verticals. So we started building a product to bring best-in-class logistics tech to the healthcare space.
How is it different?
We have a patented logistics engine powering all of our route optimization, to ensure that our efficiency is best in class. We’ve also built our platform to specifically solve the unique workflow constraints of home healthcare providers, as opposed to other field service solutions that are geared more towards plumbing companies, etc.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We’re targeting the home healthcare space, which was $140B last year growing at 7% per year.
What’s your business model?
We sell SaaS on a per-user per month pricing model.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
We got profitable last year, to ensure that we’d be prepared to weather any economic storm no matter how long it lasted. While we’ve resumed hiring since we raised additional capital, we plan on keeping burn low to ensure that we continue to have significant runway until the capital markets are warmer.
What was the funding process like?
The most recent funding was all from existing investors, or investors we had a previous relationship with. Based on our business traction they reached out proactively, and we were able to align on terms that made sense for all parties.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Coordinating across the different parties was more difficult than it had been in the past, as investors are moving slower and more deliberately than before.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
There’s clear and demonstrated value being created for our customers, in a market that is very large and has an obvious need for technological improvement.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We will continue hiring and begin publishing detailed customer testimonials describing the specific impact our product has had on their business. Within 6 months we hope to have multiple new technical integrations to announce, as well as a general release of our AI scheduler.
What advice can you offer companies in Los Angeles that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Focus on solving a problem where you can clearly measure and quantify the value you’re creating for your customers. If the value is clear, a low-commitment pilot for your customer will turn into long-term contracts, and in a risk off-market you need to reduce friction to getting customers in the door. And then once you have clearly demonstrated value for customers, and a repeatable GTM motion, you can project revenue with enough accuracy to scale costs alongside future revenue and keep burn low.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Focus is on building partnerships with other software platforms in the space, and continuing to build a best in class technical team.
What is your favorite restaurant in LA?
Little Fatty.
