Why We Invested in Watershed Health

By Sophia Friedman

Hospital readmissions place a large burden on the healthcare system. Each year, hospital readmissions cost payors ~$40B in disbursements and hospitals ~$560M in penalties alone. Many hospital readmissions are avoidable, and there has been an increased focus on reducing hospital readmissions to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.

For example, the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) is a Medicare value-based purchasing program that “encourages hospitals to improve communication and care coordination to better engage patients and caregivers in discharge plans and, in turn, reduce avoidable readmissions.”  As can be seen in the HRRP’s mission, care coordination is a key consideration in improving outcomes and reducing readmissions. The care coordination market, which seeks to minimize the number of avoidable hospital readmissions, is large and growing.

Solution

Watershed Health is a community-wide care collaboration platform which connects clinical and non-clinical care teams to facilitate communication, streamline the exchange of data and improve care management.  For this reason, Watershed is an optimal tool in the post-acute environment where it is used to manage the hand-offs between acute and post-acute care providers, enabling better continuity of care and sharing of data (including around the social determinants of health) to reduce readmissions and improve outcomes for patients. Specific stakeholders include hospitals, medical transportation providers, home health, in-patient rehab, and skilled-nursing facilities. Watershed interfaces with any electronic health record (EHR) through a simple, universal connector to create real-time data exchange between the various involved stakeholders (acute and post-acute care providers).  The platform improves care coordination and reduces readmissions, thereby improving health outcomes, enables transparency and optimizes post-acute care networks.

Why We Invested

Whereas existing solutions simply collect health data, Watershed takes into consideration the needs of various stakeholders to continuously measure provider collaboration and patient outcomes. As a next generation platform, Watershed is designed for all providers in both acute care settings (hospitals and health systems) and post-acute care settings (including home health, in-patient rehab, skilled-nursing facilities) to drive improved outcomes for patients and cost reductions for health plans. Watershed is directly driving impact by supporting the transition to value based care.  The platform aggregates member data and gives providers real time insights to manage care transitions in order to transition patients from acute care centers back into their communities. Watershed gives  providers actionable insights needed to act in real time and the tools to collaborate across care settings to improve patient outcomes.

Watershed’s leadership team consists of healthcare experts with longstanding experience in their respective fields and strong industry networks that will prove useful in Watershed’s growth. The team has specific expertise on the transition to value based care, sales executives with experience scaling similar models and physicians with first hand knowledge of the patient journey and the unmet needs in this space. The team complements one another and each brings a unique set of skills and experiences that will help the company through its next phase of growth. 

Impact

Watershed’s referral management and data & analytics platform drives better patient outcomes.

• As an example, Watershed’s platform helped one hospice agency reduce the time between hospital discharge and hospice intake from 36 hours to 5 hours, resulting in a drastic reduction in 30-day readmission rate from 10.6% to 2.8%.

• One of Watershed’s initial clients experienced a sustained decline in the 30-day hospital readmission rate: before Watershed, the hospital readmission rate in the region was approximately 18%. After a two-year rollout and expansion period, hospital readmission has dropped to between 9% and 11%.

Watershed has a unique ability to directly impact patient outcomes by improving care transitions and therefore reducing readmissions rates. Watershed has a significant amount of data and metrics that it aggregates on a regular basis which will prove helpful in better understanding how Watershed drives improved outcomes and lowers the cost of care. 

Why We Invested in Acelero

By Rahul Bhide

Early childhood education (ECE) is critical for educational outcomes; 90% of brain development happens before the age of 5. Studies have shown that high-quality ECE interventions result in improved academic achievement, cognitive development, emotional development, and self-regulation. Furthermore, ECE benefits accrued over children’s lifetime include improved earning potential and economic opportunity, as well as reductions in public and private healthcare expenditure. The absence of ECE is also strongly felt; a child without ECE is 25% more likely to drop out of school, 40% more likely to become a teenage parent, 60% more likely to never attend college, and 70% more likely to be arrested for violent crime.

The supply of ECE in the US is severely hampered, with existing providers lacking adequate capacity, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. 51% of Americans live in a child care desert, largely low-income and minority communities.

Solution

Acelero is an ECE platform serving low income communities, as a direct operator of Head Start (HS) centers (Acelero Learning) and via tech-enabled services to other HS operators (Shine Early Learning) and states and municipalities (Shine Advance).

Acelero started operating HS centers in 2005, focusing on closing the Achievement Gap by delivering high-quality educational outcomes, and have been nationally recognized for their results. 

Building on their years of direct teaching and operating experience, they launched Shine Early Learning in 2011, sharing best practices and providing critical infrastructure to other Head Start operators nationwide. Small-scale studies of educational outcomes with Shine Early Learning partners results have been extremely positive. Looking to make a deeper impact on the early childhood education system at scale, in 2019, they launched Shine Advance to support state and municipal governments to improve the quality of early education providers under their jurisdiction, through IP and tech-enabled services.

Acelero operates 54 centers in 4 states, directly serving 5,000 children annually; and through their work with state agencies, child care centers, home-based providers, private and public pre-K and Head Start and Early Head Start programs, they impact more than 150,000 children and their families across 28 states and territories.

Why We Invested

Acelero’s CEO, Henry Wilde, was a co-founder of the organization 20 years ago. He is extremely mission-aligned, knows the early childhood space very well, and is backed by a veteran management team of 28 comprised of recognized and diverse leaders in the field committed to the outcomes-based business model, leading curriculum development and comprehensive support for teachers, families and students, with 1500+ other employees.

Acelero has a strong and proven direct center business model built over their 20 year history, along with a unique solution set. They have developed a strong, four-pronged early learning framework, comprised of educational content, teaching, family engagement, and data-driven management. Acelero operates in a large, but heavily fragmented early childhood education and childcare market, where both quality and technology adoption levels are highly variable. This positions an established, technology-forward player like Acelero well to succeed in this market.

Beyond directly operating Head Start centers, the organization is uniquely positioned to serve Shine clients from other Head Start providers to a diverse set of state and municipal governments, and the strong traction they have achieved to date speaks to that. 

Impact

We believe that high-quality early childhood education imparted directly (via Acelero directly-operated centers) and indirectly (via Shine Early Learning/Advance) will be critical in closing the achievement gap for low-income children, and contributing to increased economic mobility. We have confidence that they will be able to do this because they are one of the only players in the space with best-in-class externally validated outcomes, with Acelero students outperforming the Head Start standards by 2.9 - 4.7x on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The impact of the Acelero/Shine model has also been demonstrated at scale. They have been repeatedly recognized as a Head Start exemplar by the Office of Head Start, and studies performed by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University have regularly measured the improvement in outcomes delivered by Acelero since 2015, including some of the highest ever outcomes gains ever recorded in a Head Start program.  

Furthermore, we believe that Acelero, through its rigorous professional development model and upskilling program for Acelero employees, enables increased economic opportunity for employees in low-income areas. At a systems change level, we also believe that proving that a high quality, for-profit, PE-backed model can work in early-childhood education will catalyze the space and education investing in the US.

Why We Invested in Dandi

By Rahul Bhide

Workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is important not only because it is the right thing for organizations to do but also because it can deliver improved business outcomes: HBR has been writing about that linkage since 1996. Employees also care about DEI; 76% of employees and job seekers said diversity was important when considering job offers. Amidst successful votes for racial equity audits at firms like McDonald’s, Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Home Depot, it is increasingly clear that there is a significant appetite to understand where to focus future efforts and whether DEI initiatives are generating meaningful results.

According to CultureAmp’s 2022 Workplace DEI Landscape report, although most organizations (83%) are collecting DEI data, only a handful are analyzing pay equity (only 15% do it more than once a year) and performance equity (only 29% do it once per cycle, all others less than once per cycle or never). Data sharing is limited: only 34% of companies share DEI data outside of the executive team. Most importantly, less than half of organizations actually used DEI data to make decisions, despite wanting to do so. Organizations keen to make data-driven DEI/HR decisions are hampered by existing HR information systems’ data sharing limitations and static analysis that often relies on analysts manually gathering data and running analyses periodically.

Solution

Dandi is the data analytics platform for DEI, enabling organizations to make data-driven DEI decisions. Dandi starts by pulling in information from any major HR information system or data store, and then allows anyone from CEOs to DEI teams to analyze the organization at a macro level and drill down for specific intersectional insights. Dandi is also launching a user-friendly tool to allow non-technical employees the ability to import new data files/feeds, and define new metrics.

Why We Invested

The founding team at Dandi is one of the strongest we've seen in the DEI space. Building on extensive technical backgrounds and a deep knowledge of the HR tech space, they’ve developed a best-in-class product. Dandi is able to work with all major HR information systems and data stores, and includes powerful dashboards to move from high-level to granular analysis, exportable reports, and regularly refreshed data.

Despite not having officially launched, Dandi has secured several early customers through the founding team’s network and received sustained inbound interest from companies very interested in what they have to offer, building early traction while being extremely capital efficient.

Impact

We believe that Dandi will enable employers to become more diverse, equitable and inclusive by enabling more accurate, more granular, more automated, and more accessible DEI analysis. There is also the potential for Dandi to collect the data to be able to link business performance to DEI at a granular level, which could be game-changing from an impact perspective. Additionally, as Dandi reaches significant scale, its aggregated (and anonymized) dataset will be an enormously valuable source of insights for HR/DEI teams, leadership teams, and policymakers.

We’ve seen Dandi in action and the results are significant for early applications; after one client engaged with Dandi, they identified and reduced gender pay gaps from 10% to 2.5%. After being deployed at another company, voluntary data collection for ethnicities went from 25% to 90%+ in a quarter. At another client, Dandi identified pay gaps between those who identified as primary caregivers and those who didn’t, and was able to support the client in addressing those.

Circuit: Why We Invested

By Chris Wu

The rise in urban traffic is putting massive financial and logistical pressure on cities, corporations and transportation providers while also having an extremely negative effect on the environment. US drivers make an estimated 186 billion trips per year, and 33% of all vehicle trips in the US are 2 miles or less. Meanwhile, studies have shown that ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft have caused a 160% increase in urban traffic and the growth in last-mile deliveries is projected to increase congestion by 21%. As a result, cities are currently responsible for 70% of global CO2 emissions, and 1/3 of that is generated by transport.

Solution

Circuit provides tech-enabled, shared, electric mobility services specializing in pooled short distance trips (0-3 miles). Circuit is focused on making short-range, shared mobility more efficient and sustainable with their on-demand app, teams of W2 drivers, and fleets of 100% electric vehicles. Circuit solves the short distance trip problem by working with cities and private companies to build and deploy turnkey solutions for delivering shared rides that reduce the number of trips made by single occupancy vehicles, resulting in fewer GHG emissions, less air pollution, and less congestion. Circuit is able to provide all this at a cost that can be as much as 5x less than alternatives and is free or low-cost to riders.

Why We Invested

Circuit’s co-founders, Alex Esposito and James Mirras, are impressive entrepreneurs with a deep understanding of the business and the problem they’re solving for cities, transportation planners, and for their private partners. They have successfully scaled an operationally complex, logistically challenging business while being extremely capital efficient. Circuit’s last mile solution has demonstrated that it can serve as a connector to public transit systems or mass transit hubs, and has effectively addressed transit deserts in places like West Dallas. The company has strong business traction with a diverse set of customers including cities, municipal partners, private inter-city rail companies, and real estate property owners.

Circuit has delivered over 5 million rides to date, and the company is actively operating in 25+ communities across the country such as San Diego, CA, New Rochelle, NY, and Hollywood, FL. We’ve also been impressed with Circuit’s ability to address cities’ short distance transportation challenges at a significantly lower cost. For example, in Pompano Beach, FL Circuit has provided over 2,000 riders per car per month at a cost-per-rider of $2.28 whereas fixed route buses with low ridership can cost a city over $35 per rider.

Impact

We believe Circuit's tech-enabled, on-demand shared mobility microtransit services can act as a connector to address transit deserts while reducing traffic congestion, reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMTs), preventing GHG emissions, and lowering household transportation costs. In 2021 alone, Circuit served over 650,000 riders, reduced congestion by over 1,000,000 vehicle miles traveled, and prevented 535 tons of CO2 emissions (which is the equivalent of 60,224 gallons of gas). 

The Shared-Use Mobility Center describes shared mobility as the systems and infrastructure that allows for the reduction of transportation costs as well as the reduction of carbon emissions by sharing rides and sharing vehicles. Studies have reported that shared mobility reduces the dependence on using private cars. By giving people more ways to get around, shared mobility can make our streets safer and connect more people to more opportunities. By reducing our need to own and drive (and park) our private cars, shared mobility can help reshape our streets, our towns, and our cities. Circuit offers a form of shared mobility called microtransit which is generally defined as pooled, on-demand transportation using electric vans and/or shuttles operating outside fixed routes. The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) states that microtransit can be an excellent way to address existing transit deserts, and names microtransit as one of the most promising ways to create more equitable access to electric mobility for low-to-moderate income (LMI) residents with the potential for significantly lower costs than other modes, which Circuit has clearly demonstrated. 

Alcanza: Why We Invested

By Sophia Friedman

Clinical trials have historically lacked representation from diverse ethnic and racial groups, while also lacking diversity in gender and age. Clinical trial populations are often not proportionate to the populations that are affected by the disease.  Recent studies have shed light on the lack of diversity in clinical research. One example can be found in gender representation.  Women and specifically women of color have historically been underrepresented in clinical trials. A recent Northwestern Medicine study analyzed over 20,000 clinical trials between 2000 and 2020 and found that women are underrepresented in clinical trials in cardiology, oncology, neurology, immunology and hematology. This stat is particularly troubling given that cardiologic and oncologic diseases are among the leading causes of death among women in the United States.

Minorities are also vastly underrepresented in clinical research. A 2019 article in JAMA Oncology highlighting the disparities in race reporting and diversity in clinical trials in oncology found that on average, 76% of trial participants were white, 18% Black, 3% Asian and 6% Hispanic.  Even more striking, a recent analysis of Alzheimer’s trials found that while Black people are more prone than White people to develop Alzheimer’s disease, they represent only 2% of those included in clinical trials.

Adequate representation is critical in clinical research for various reasons. First, disparities in access to clinical trials prevent minorities from benefiting from advances in science. Additionally, lack of adequate trial diversity can result in trial outcomes that are less applicable to the entire population. Further, therapies can have different efficacy and safety effects in different subpopulations.  Therefore, lack of diversity in clinical trials may fail to assess racial differences that affect clinical outcomes. Diversity in trials is needed to promote equitable access to healthcare and to improve outcomes by making trial populations better reflect the population across various racial, ethnic, gender and age groups. However, historically, no clinical trial site network platforms have specifically focused on diversity and increasing representation of minority groups.

Solution
Alcanza, which means reach in Spanish, is focused on targeting diverse clinical trial participants and underserved markets to improve equitable representation in the clinical research space. Alcanza Clinical Research is a multi-site, multi-phase clinical research platform with locations currently in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Michigan and South Carolina. The company has established a presence across Phase I-IV studies and various therapeutic areas, including Neurology, Dermatology, Psychiatry and Vaccine.  This is a roll-up strategy in which Martis Capital formed Alcanza upon the acquisition of three initial sites, has since acquired a fourth site and intends to continue to grow both organically and via acquisition of additional sites.  By leveraging its national footprint, best-in-class systems, standard operating procedures and deep sponsor relationships, Alcanza is positioned to become a market-leading platform in a highly fragmented space of more than 2,500 independent research sites. 

Why We Invested
Minorities continue to be under-represented in clinical trials. However, racial, gender and age diversity is critical in ensuring the equality, validity, and scientific rigor of clinical research. While the issue is beginning to gain wider acceptance, scientific research still suffers from a severe lack of representation across all therapeutic areas. Recently, the FDA and pharmaceutical sponsors have called for greater trial diversity that better resembles the overall population. Further, lack of patient recruitment diversity can slow the drug development process, as evidenced recently by the Moderna COVID vaccine clinical trial. However, while the FDA has called for greater representation in clinical trials, no specific regulations have been enacted. Given the FDA and society’s push for pharmaceutical corporations to implement adequate patient diversity in clinical research combined with the fact that there is no existing market leader in the space, clinical trial site networks such asAlcanzaare well positioned to differentiate themselves by driving recruitment of minority populations. A scaled clinical trial platform such asAlcanzawill have the integrated systems and capabilities to run larger and more complex trials with diverse patient populations, thereby advancing innovative treatments through the various clinical trial stages.

The Alcanza team has extensive experience in the clinical research space and integrating sites. More importantly, the team has an explicit focus on the patient experience and recruiting diverse patient populations; diversity in clinical trial participants is core to the Alcanza team’s mission. Specifically, CEO Carlos Orantes has over 25 years of experience in the drug development industry. Carlos previously led a leading site network brand and oversaw over 50 clinical trial sites.  He has direct expertise integrating sites into a broader platform and brings with him a depth of industry relationships and clinical trial expertise. Further, Alcanza’s leadership and the lead investor, Martis Capital, are working closely together in further professionalizing the Alcanza platform. More recently, the Martis Capital and Alcanza teams have developed a true partnership, working together to launch the Alcanza platform and develop the core business strategy. The Martis Capital and Alcanza teams share a similar mission to build a leading clinical trial site network that is committed to increasing representation in the clinical trial space.

Impact
We believe that Alcanza can not only increase representation for minority groups in the clinical trials that it manages, but also has the potential to serve as a market leader in this space and help to change the way the industry approaches diversity in clinical trials. Central to our investment thesis is the fact that Alcanza aims to increase representation for underrepresented groups in clinical research. However, recruiting and retaining diverse populations into clinical trials is not always straightforward as specific subpopulations may be hesitant to enroll in clinical trials, may lack the means of adhering to the trial requirements and may be uneducated as to how their involvement in trials may impact their own health as well as contribute to broader scientific research. Therefore, there is a high level of engagement required by Alcanza in order to educate and engage diverse populations. We are confident that Alcanza has the expertise and the commitment to address this issue.  Alcanza has brought on a well-regarded industry expert to serve as the Chief Patient Experience Officer, a leadership role unique to Alcanza within the industry, which further solidifies Alcanza’s focus on this issue.   Alcanza intends to specifically focus on aspects related to community and patient engagement in order to successfully recruit and retain diverse trial participants.

Stellic: Why We Invested

By Tasha Seitz

Even before the pandemic, 1 in 3 students that started college in the US did not end up finishing their degree. As colleges and universities face decreasing enrollment, they are experiencing more financial pressure that is pushing them towards more cost-effective advising and a more student-centric approach. At most colleges and universities, advisors have a very high case load of students and have to rely on incumbent technology solutions that are often decades old with unfriendly and outdated user interfaces. As a result, advisors tend to focus on the students most proactive in reaching out to them and the students that have been flagged as most at-risk, leaving advisors without the time/capacity to serve the vast majority of students in the “silent middle.”

Solution

Stellic is an integrated planning and advising platform for college students to plan their courses to align with their degree requirements and career aspirations. The current product offers five modules: Pathways, Schedule, Audit, Advise and Report. Colleges and universities do not need to replace their existing systems, rather Stellic will integrate with existing student information systems and learning management systems while providing a more modern interface that connects existing data to students’ goals and degree requirements. Stellic’s “play-list” interface provides a significantly improved student experience.

In addition to providing much better tools for students, Stellic enables advisors to identify and assist students at risk of dropping out or graduating late and provide appropriate support and interventions to keep those students on track. For the large population of students in the “silent middle” that are not highly motivated, Stellic can ensure they have chosen a degree pathway and flag for both students and advisors any near term decisions regarding adding/dropping classes that might put their pathway at risk. By decreasing the administrative work that advisors need to do, Stellic enables advisors to be more effective and more efficient, lowering the overall cost of advising.

Because Stellic allows students to plan their future course load and encourages every student to commit to a pathway, universities can predict course demand and ensure that courses are offered when students need them in order to graduate.

Why We Invested

Stellic’s founder, Sabih Bin Wasi, is an impressive entrepreneur who was inspired to found the company based on his own frustrations in navigating the course planning process in higher ed. Sabih is deeply committed to solving this problem for students while providing value to colleges and universities. The company has impressive early traction with a diverse set of customers, including University of Chicago, Duke, Columbia, University of Minnesota, University of Oklahoma, Colorado College, and Cal State Northridge. Stellic has also seen inbound interest from international higher end institutions and successfully closed several international customers. The company has a very strong technical team through the founders’ relationship with the top technical university in Pakistan, and the product is built in a modular fashion to enable a “land and expand” sales strategy which is already showing success.

We really appreciate that Stellic can address both the needs of the sophisticated student that wants to do their own “what if” analysis as well as the needs of students that may not be as motivated to plan for the future and just need focus/direction to ensure they are on an efficient path towards graduation. We also believe there is a significant opportunity to reduce friction for students that have stopped out and are re-enrolling in a degree program to understand their most efficient and cost-effective path to achieve their personal and educational goals.

Impact

We expect Stellic to improve retention and college completion rates, reduce the total cost of getting a degree by ensuring all credit-hours help students achieve their graduation requirements, and reduce friction for transfer students and students that have stopped out and are re-enrolling in a degree program. In the longer term, the company’s vision is to enable students to plan effectively for their post-college career and track career outcomes.

The Helper Bees: Why We Invested

By Sophia Friedman

There are over 46M adults over age 65 living in the US today, and that number is expected to grow to almost 90M by 2050. The global population is aging at unprecedented rates -- older people make up an increasing share of the world’s population. This phenomenon is more pronounced in the United States than anywhere else in the world. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that older adults (people over 65) are expected to outnumber children under the age of 18 by 2034. Given the speed with which the US population is aging, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic which has highlighted health risks associated with institutionalization, there are increasing pressures to enable adults to age in place and keep older adults out of senior living facilities. 

Solution

The Helper Bees (THB) partners with Long-Term Care Insurance carriers and Medicare Advantage health plans to provide quality care and appropriate tools to keep older adults independent, healthy and living at home longer. The Helper Bees strives to help older adults age in place successfully and does so by addressing the ‘social determinants of aging’: the conditions in the environments where people age that affect a wide range of health outcomes. The Helper Bees has developed a complete regulatory and administrative platform that blends claims processing, provider recruitment, and provider credentialing with the member-facing aging-in-place marketplace, aggregating all in-home care and support services into one platform. The platform’s direct impact is increased member satisfaction, improved health outcomes, and reduced claims costs and institutionalization rates.

Why We Invested

By 2040, 80 million Americans will be over the age of 65. 40 million individuals will need long-term care, and 90% of these will want to remain at home as they age. Today’s demographic shifts are changing consumer demands and placing unique pressures on the payors of long-term care. These payors, including Medicare Advantage and Long-Term Care Insurers, will need to focus on improving the social determinants of aging in order to improve care delivery to older adults. The Helper Bees addresses this market opportunity by providing a comprehensive aging-in-place platform to allow payors to tap into provider networks that enable older adults to age at home more seamlessly and successfully, thus resulting in better health outcomes at lower costs.

The Helper Bees aggregates various solutions related to the aging process into one to provide a single point of entry through which patients or caregivers can manage their own care. While point solutions exist to address various fragmented portions of the aging process, The Helper Bees is unique in that it consolidates these solutions into one platform that manages both the services themselves as well as claims processing, thus removing friction from the aging process. The Helper Bees’ team has proven themselves to be a strong leaders and well versed in understanding the unique payor environment related to Long-Term Care Insurance and Medicare Advantage. The team has a clear focus on improving the aging process for older adults and understands the importance of making healthcare more equitable and accessible to improve healthcare for all older adults regardless of socioeconomic class or demographics.

Impact

We believe The Helper Bees has the ability to make a positive impact by providing a solution that improves the aging process for older adults by focusing on the social determinants of aging. The Helper Bees has already demonstrated a meaningful reduction in the institutionalization of seniors – its Care Concierge product has resulted in a significant reduction in institutionalization to date. Further, The Helper Bees improves the process of aging in older adults in two ways:

1. By enabling individuals to more easily understand and take advantage of their supplemental benefits

2. By managing payment and reimbursement for these services, which individuals might not have the cash flow to support, therefore making these services more accessible to aging individuals

The Helper Bees reaches customers in all 50 US states of varying socioeconomic classes, races and ethnicities. The Helper Bees is in the process of expanding into Medicare Advantage, launching with its first customer in 2022. Medicare Advantage plans are often focused on chronically ill populations, which includes patients that are also eligible for Medicaid coverage – these patients are dual eligible, meaning the beneficiaries quality for both Medicare and Medicaid benefits. We anticipate dual eligible members will be a critical area of focus for The Helper Bees as the Company expands to partner with more Medicare Advantage customers. As the company continues to scale and expand into Medicare Advantage, we are excited by The Helper Bee’s opportunity to expand access to underserved populations and to improve the aging process for all.

Slang: Why We Invested

By Ander Iruretagoyena and Tasha Seitz

In today’s society there are over 59 zettabytes of information. Despite its impressive size, the fact that this global knowledge base is primarily encoded in English (i.e., 90%+ of scientific research is published in English) means that the over 6.6B non-English speakers have limited access to technical know-how, innovation, and new developments that occur worldwide. For expanding businesses, young graduates, scientists, researchers, and immigrants, English proficiency is an essential gateway to economic opportunity as it broadens horizons, lowers barriers, and speeds information exchange. As more and more multinational companies like Airbus, Samsung, Daimler-Chrysler, etc., mandate English as the common corporate language, the incentives to learn English have never been greater, and the demand for talent with English proficiency far outpaces supply.  However, access to acquiring professionally relevant English skills has been persistently limited by a lack of tailored, flexible and affordable upskilling resources.

In the United States, which has always been a polyglot nation, low levels of English proficiency are the most significant risk factor for underemployment. In a recent study examining the costs of untapped talent, it was found that within the immigrant population, those who reported speaking English “not well” or “not at all” were five times more likely to be in low-skilled jobs than those who speak English natively. As another data point, the 20 million Americans with limited English proficiency who comprise over 10% of the working age population in the US, earn 25-40% less than their English proficient counterparts.

Although there are many English-learning solutions on the market, traditional curricula cannot address the professional knowledge gap because they typically only teach conversational English or generic “business” English. 

Solution

Slang provides an adaptive, digital, ML-driven language-learning platform focused on professional English. This groundbreaking software tailors language learning to specific roles and professional vocabulary (e.g., accounting, maintenance, customer service) each of which may require a different level of emphasis on writing, speaking, reading and listening skills. Its innovative, learner-centric approach encompasses every domain of specialized English and provides meaningful access to global knowledge. For prices as low as $6/month, a Slang subscription makes specialized English much more accessible to students and workers in low- to middle-income categories. Organizations that might, in the past, have reserved English training for those in top management due to the high costs of domain-specific in-person classes and tutoring, can now expand a catalytic benefit to all individuals. The company is currently targeting Latin American markets, specifically Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, with plans to expand to the US market.

Why We Invested

English language learning is a $15B market in the Americas and $98B worldwide. In Slang, we saw a large opportunity, a company armed with a unique and defensible competitive advantage, and a mission-oriented team led by Diego Villegas. Diego is a non-native English speaker from Colombia. Prior to founding Slang, he was the founder and CEO of MASA, a Colombia-based technical services business that grew to 5,000 employees and $200M in revenues and was acquired by a European based-multinational. In the post-acquisition integration, Diego saw many of his employees get laid off because of their lack of English proficiency, which motivated him and Kamran Khan, an MIT-trained AI expert, to found Slang.

The focus on professional English differentiates Slang from the myriad of general language solutions in the market. Slang is architected and designed to rapidly deploy new knowledge domains and languages.  While the initial curriculum was designed to teach English to Spanish speakers, the company was, in a matter of weeks, able to quickly add support for Portuguese speakers in order to launch in the Brazilian market. Additionally, the team is focused on user experience and committed to positively impacting the economic well-being of workers, which has driven outsized NPS scores relative to industry averages. 

Impact

We believe that Slang has the ability to remove the barriers preventing many low-  moderate-income workers from accessing career opportunities within the knowledge economy. Slang’s professional English solution should drive increased upward mobility and higher employability, along with higher productivity and career-related knowledge in three main ways:

1. Expansion of access to knowledge: as workers’ English proficiency improves, they are able to access a wider range of high-quality content, including training and professional development courses, technical and reference manuals, and scientific research. 

2. Leveling the playing field for a global workforce: as English has become the lingua franca for business, improving the professional English skills of workers enables businesses of all sizes to participate more effectively in the global economy and drive better economic outcomes for workers, businesses, and countries.

3. Narrowing the knowledge gap between employee classes at the companies they serve: the affordability, flexibility, and specificity of Slang’s solution results in more training options even for blue-collar or nonexecutive roles, which traditionally don’t have access to English training.