Creators of On-call Healthcare App Heal Raise $3.8M to Launch Health Data App HeyRenee for Elderly

On-call healthcare app Heal founder Dr. Renee Dua (right), seen here with co-founder and husband Nick Desai and their son, have raised $3.8 million for their new health data app, “HeyRenee.” (Heal photo provided)

By GIOVANNI ALBANESE Jr./India-West Staff Reporter

The Indian American founders of home-centric primary care company Heal, Dr. Renee Dua and Nick Desai, Aug. 5 announced that they have raised $3.8 million in funding to launch a new health data app venture called HeyRenee.

HeyRenee, a personal care concierge, is the latest innovation from Dua and Desai, which comes on the heels of spending seven years building the award-winning Heal.

“It is impossibly difficult for all of us, certainly older, sicker Americans, to follow the many instructions from their doctors,” Dua, a practicing nephrologist who served as chief of medicine at Heal upon founding the company in 2014, said in a statement.

“Those instructions are the recipe for patients to lead happier, healthier lives, and people need help managing those instructions,” she added. “Our hope for HeyRenee is for us to build something to finally slow the progression and exploding costs of easily treated chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, hypertension and mental health issues by taking the burden of managing healthcare and making it effortless.”

Launching in early 2022, HeyRenee’s focus is a uniquely patient-centric digital health platform designed to make better healthcare a reality for all Americans, especially the elderly, underserved, and those managing chronic conditions, according to a news release.

Unlike previous approaches to synchronize patient care, HeyRenee is the first-ever open platform that will eventually work with every provider, partner, and point solution to curate the perfect combination of services for each patient’s specific needs, the release notes.

Quiet Capital led the oversubscribed $3.8 million funding round, with Mucker Capital, Fika Ventures, Tau Ventures, Global Founders Capital and SaaS Venture Capital also participating.

HeyRenee is using seed proceeds to curate digital health partners, build a world-class team of product and engineering leaders, and win early customers, the release went on.

Eighty-five percent of the people who used telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 had a household income over $150,000. However, the true potential of the digital health revolution is to transform care for the neediest amongst us, the release notes.

HeyRenee aims to do that by demystifying and integrating previously disconnected point solutions and providers to work together in a data-driven symphony in a delightfully easy patient-centric experience, it said.

“We’re in the first inning of realizing the true potential of the digital transformation of American healthcare,” adds Desai, co-founder of HeyRenee. “Starting with underserved and elderly polychronic patients, HeyRenee will help all Americans proactively manage all aspects of their healthcare to lead healthier, happier lives.”

HeyRenee intends to ease the burden of healthcare coordination — from appointment scheduling, in-home services and medication delivery to telehealth and symptom and vital signs monitoring, all in one easy-to-use and highly intuitive app, the release said.

“HeyRenee is a brilliant idea and the fact that this idea comes from Nick and Renee, who previously co-founded Heal, a company we respect very much,” Amit Garg, managing partner at Tau Ventures, said in a statement. “At Tau we invest in AI-first companies and having a moat around data is key. We believe in the benefits HeyRenee will offer to help seniors with major tasks around healthcare — schedule appointments, take the right medications in a timely manner, get services and help improve their lives,” Garg said.

(Heal has been previously profiled in India-West. Read: https://bit.ly/3lA7UBw.)