Health-care platform Fullscript closed a deal last week to acquire Rupa Health, a startup headquartered in San Francisco that helps medical practitioners order, track and manage thousands of laboratory tests in a single interface.
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One of Ottawa’s brightest tech stars just edged closer to reaching a monumental revenue milestone.
Health-care platform Fullscript closed a deal last week to acquire Rupa Health, a startup headquartered in San Francisco that helps medical practitioners order, track and manage thousands of laboratory tests in a single interface.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, and Fullscript co-founder and CEO Kyle Braatz would not reveal further financial details about Rupa Health. But he said the 190-person company gives Fullscript a level of diagnostic expertise the firm lacked even as it was developing its own lab workflow platform.
“That’s been going really well, but when there’s an opportunity to accelerate our mission and the vision we have for health care, any opportunity to do that just makes sense,” Braatz told Techopia in an interview last week.
Founded in 2020, Rupa Health serves tens of thousands of medical clinics across the United States.
In addition to helping doctors and other health-care professionals order and manage medical tests, the company also runs an online education platform, Rupa University, that offers courses to practitioners on various aspects of “whole-person care,” including how to properly use diagnostic tools and incorporate supplements into patient treatment plans.
“They’ve done an incredible job building an entrepreneurial tech startup out of (Silicon) Valley,” Braatz said of Rupa Health founders Tara Viswanathan and Rosa Hamalainen.
Viswanathan, who earned a master’s degree in engineering from Stanford University, said the two companies are “committed to bringing a new model of health care” to North America.
“We couldn’t be more excited to join forces with Fullscript and drive real change for the millions of patients and practitioners who want better options for their health,” she said in a statement. “Whole person care is the future, and this is just the beginning.”
It’s the latest M&A gambit for Fullscript in its quest to become a household name in health-care delivery.
In 2022, the company acquired U.S.-based competitor Emerson Ecologics in a deal that virtually doubled its sales overnight.
More than 100,000 physicians, nurses and other wellness professionals now use Fullscript’s technology to prescribe supplements and create personalized nutritional regimens and other treatment plans for 10 million patients across Canada and the United States.
Bringing Rupa Health into the fold pushes the Ottawa-based organization, which generated more than US$700 million in revenues in 2023, past the 1,000-employee mark.
But Braatz said the deal’s long-term potential benefits will extend far beyond the balance sheet – as he made clear to his employees in no uncertain terms last week when announcing the acquisition.
“I just said, ‘I’m sick and tired of being the greatest company that nobody knows about,’” Braatz said. “This accelerates our profile in the market and … the value we can provide to practitioners.”
Earlier this year, Braatz told Techopia he believes annual revenue growth of 30 to 40 per cent is well within reach for Fullscript. That would put the company on almost the same trajectory as another Ottawa tech darling, Shopify, was at the same stage of its existence.
That’s the kind of rarefied air Fullscript is striving to inhabit under Braatz’s leadership. He said the acquisition of Rupa Health will help push the company “really close” to US$1 billion in annual revenues, a landmark he has targeted for years and one Fullscript is now tantalizingly close to reaching.
“We will hit that number in 2025,” Braatz said. “This definitely gets us a little bit closer to that.”
Meanwhile, Ottawa’s 2022 CEO of the Year also has high hopes for another organization he owns a part of – albeit a much smaller piece than his stake in Fullscript.
The University of Ottawa alumnus is now an investor in the Ottawa Senators after being invited to join the NHL team’s ownership group last year under new majority owner Michael Andlauer.
Braatz confidently predicted the Sens, who are off to a 2-1 start this season, will be “playoff-bound” next spring after coming up short of the post-season for the past seven years.
“I think they’ve got the right makeup of the team now,” he explained with a smile. “I’m excited to see what they’re going to do.”
That about mirrors his assessment of Fullscript.
“It’s been a long run,” Braatz said of the company’s ascent from its beginnings as an online supplement dispensary in 2011. “The vision has always been there, but now we’re at a point of scale that we can actually execute against it, so it’s super exciting.”
