Rupa Health Raises $20M to Bring Root Cause Medicine to the World  

The Series A, led by Bessemer Ventures New Funds, will be used to meet skyrocketing practitioner and patient demand

San Francisco, CA – Rupa Health, a healthcare company that is building the digital platform for the next evolution of medicine, root cause medicine, today announced the close of a $20 million Series A led by Bessemer Ventures (Partners Talia Goldberg and Jeremy Levine). The total funding for Rupa is now at $26 million. Bessemer joins existing investors First Round Capital, Lachy Groom, SV Angel, Floodgate, Hustle Fund, Operator Collective, the Chainsmokers, Jared Leto, Joe Montana and more who all participated in the latest round as well.

Rupa is revolutionizing medicine by enabling access to root cause medicine – where practitioners aim to identify and solve the true, underlying cause of an illness. A root cause approach looks at a person’s health holistically and employs advanced, comprehensive diagnostics to understand everything from genetics to diet, stress and cortisol levels to the microbiome, and more.

Rupa solves the most difficult part about practicing root cause medicine: labwork. Traditional bloodwork — the complete blood counts (CBCs) and metabolic panels (CMPs) historically ordered — are not the full picture. To get to the root cause, practitioners rely on cutting edge tools like advanced DNA tests, microbiome tests, comprehensive hormone panels, heavy metals testing, nutrient profiles, and more. The foundation for practicing root cause medicine is in this “fact finding” about a patient’s health, primarily done through comprehensive lab work.

Rupa’s first product is a single sign-on lab ordering portal that gives doctors access to over 3,000 specialty lab tests in one place, turning 15 hours of weekly physician admin work into 15 minutes. Before Rupa, doctors had to sign up separately with 20+ independent lab companies. To order and receive results, they dealt with a nightmare of faxes, phone calls, logins, and snail mail.

Rupa is quickly becoming the largest digital platform to connect practitioners with a variety of specialty and traditional labs and mobile phlebotomists, while making the entire process seamless for both practitioners and patients. Rupa also modernizes the patient experience for completing tests with text message ordering, video instructions, and seamless payment plans. Any licensed healthcare practitioner in the USA can sign up today and start ordering tests through Rupa in under five minutes.

In 2020, its first year of operations, Rupa exploded from a simple prototype to generating a multi-million dollar top line. Then, In 2021, in its second year of operations, the team quadrupled the entire business. Now, thousands of practitioners in all 50 states are using Rupa to order labs for their patients. Rupa has built strategic partnerships with more than 25 laboratories to give practitioners access to over 3,000 traditional and specialty tests. For example, Rupa has partnerships with best in class labs like BioReference, Boston Heart, Genova Diagnostics and Precision Analytical (creators of the DUTCH test).

“There is a chronic illness epidemic happening globally. Right now, half of America is suffering from at least one chronic illness,” said Tara Viswanathan, CEO and Co-Founder of Rupa Health. “We started Rupa after witnessing first hand how a root cause approach could fundamentally change lives – rather than simply living in discomfort or taking prescription medication for the rest of their lives, patients are able to treat or reverse many chronic illnesses and live life fully again. At the core of this approach is labwork – getting the data to diagnose the root cause. The impact on streamlining labwork was evident right from the start.”

“The traditional health system has focused on treating each symptom with a pill rather than looking at how nutrition, genetics, lifestyle choices, and medications work together to affect health and wellness. Rupa is changing this and accelerating the next evolution in medicine – root cause medicine,” said Talia Goldberg, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We were blown away by Rupa’s vision and its momentum connecting practitioners to life altering lab results.

Rupa’s platform powers diagnostics for solo practices, mid-size clinics, and major hospital groups alike, including George Washington University, UC Irvine Susan Samueli Institute, Bastyr University, and more. Rupa supports practitioners coast-to-coast, and not just in major coastal innovation hubs, bringing root cause medicine to patients across America. Patient experience is also at the forefront of Rupa’s digital first platform and product offering; for example, Rupa takes blood draws to the next level with access to a network of mobile phlebotomists that tens of thousands of patients have already utilized.

“Considering the multitude of tests I order, Rupa Health is the simplest experience I’ve had in 15 years of ordering functional lab tests,” said Anne Easthope, NP with Easthope Health in San Francisco.

“I found out more from this test than I had found in the previous 15 years of stomach issues and countless doctors,” said D. Reyes from El Paso, TX.

Rupa is at the forefront of the exploding root cause medicine movement. Major medical journals like JAMA are publishing research on the benefits of root cause medicine, and major hospital groups like the Cleveland Clinic, the University of California System, and the Mayo Clinic have added root cause departments. Thousands of new specialty diagnostics have flooded the market with both new tests (DNA, microbiome, hormonal, etc.) and new sampling methodologies (saliva, stool, breath, urine, etc.). Google searches for root cause medicine related terms are breakout searches with a 5000% increase over the last five years. The evidence pointing towards a future with root cause medicine at the helm goes on and on. And yet, this is still the infancy of what will be a foundational shift in the way we practice medicine.

With lab work at its core, Rupa will continue to bring the latest diagnostic tools to its network of practitioners over the coming months by both expanding the lab catalog and building educational resources. Currently, there are over 50 lab companies on the waitlist to join Rupa.

However, the vision and opportunity of where Rupa can go in the future is so much greater than just the lab platform. Rupa will use its distribution to root cause practitioners to create products that will enable more and more patients to access this new approach to healthcare. The new funds will be used to help make root cause medicine more affordable and accessible to all.