By Anna Hensel
Weave, which sells a patient communications platform primarily for the dental and optometry industries, today announced it has raised a $37.5 million round of funding. The round was led by growth equity firm Lead Edge Capital, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Catalyst Investors, Crosslink Capital, and Pelion Venture Partners.
The Utah-based company has now raised $82.6 million in total. Headquartered in Lehi, Weave took on its first customer in 2011 and didn’t take on any outside funding until 2014, when it was accepted into Y Combinator.
CEO and cofounder Brandon Rodman told VentureBeat in a phone interview that the company’s revenue has grown more than 100 percent year over year, though he declined to give specific figures. Weave has thousands of customers who pay $499 per month for its software.
Weave was born out of Rodman’s previous startup, which was simply a scheduling service for dental offices.
“The dental industry was the perfect initial market — dentists make a lot of money, it’s not as highly regulated as the deeper medical industry, like hospitals … and there’s a lot of dentists in the U.S. to be able to sell to,” Rodman told VentureBeat.
One of Weave’s core differentiating features is that the company has created its own Voice Over IP service that integrates with its software. When an office signs up for its service, Weave actually cancels that office’s subscription with their previous phone provider is. That lock-in might scare some offices off, though Weave’s argument is that the convenience is worth the tradeoff.
When a receptionist or other staffer answers a call through Weave, the patient’s relevant information is displayed on their computer screen, including upcoming or missed appointments and overdue bills. That way, a staffer doesn’t have to go digging for that information while on a call.
The service also allows offices to send customized appointment reminders via text, and it offers a HIPAA-compliant internal chat tool.
Currently, Weave sells primarily to dental, optometry, and other medical offices, though the company has aspirations beyond health care. “Ultimately, if a business needs to communicate with their customer, we see that as a possible future customer of Weave,” Rodman said. Customers will likely remain small businesses, as bigger enterprises are more likely to hesitate about migrating over to a new VoIP.
Additionally, a retailer is going to want easy access to different customer information than a tire shop owner, so it will be critical that Weave figures out how to tailor its onscreen displays to different industries.
Currently, Weave has about 300 employees. Rodman said that the company has had “unprecedented” lack of attrition, as none of the 50 members of its product and engineering team have left in the last two years.
“Over the last year, we have more than doubled our employee base, and we did that with one recruiter,” Rodman told VentureBeat. “It was because employees were referring their friends and family members.”
