Will Jessica stop laughing? Will we get the intro right? Who knows! 2022 is a big M&A year and this episode is no exception: ThirtyMadison and Nurx have merged, combined they have $300 million in revenue; Concerto Care acquires Crown Health; Kindbody buys Vios Fertility Institute; Calm merges with Ripple Health; Withings buys 8Fit.

-By Matthew Holt

TRANSCRIPT

Jessica DaMassa:

I can’t.

Matthew Holt:

I’ll start.

Jessica DaMassa:

No, you can’t start.

Matthew Holt:

Welcome to Health Tech Deals. The show where Jessica DaMassa normally does this part, but she’s can’t because she’s laughing too much. It must be February the 9th, 2022 edition. Possibly? Yes? Maybe? I don’t know. Maybe Jessica will stop laughing after the break.

Jessica DaMassa:

Let me see that coffee cup? Sir?

Matthew Holt:

I’m just amazed that we finally made it to the show.

Jessica DaMassa:

What does that say? What does that say?

Matthew Holt:

I don’t know.

Jessica DaMassa:

“Mama needs some coffee”. For our podcast listeners who can’t see the size of this coffee cup, it is literally as big as Matthew Holt’s head. Mama needs some coffee. Okay.

Matthew Holt:

It had to be enough coffee to last through all the outtakes we just did of you laughing.

Jessica DaMassa:

This is not my fault, that you count down with words going in one direction and fingers going in another direction. This is not my fault, because you have a giant coffee cup that says, “Mama needs some coffee.” Okay? It was just a dichotomy in and of itself. It’s not my fault, because… M&A all day, my friends.

Matthew Holt:

It rhymes, it’s beautiful. It’s poetry.

Jessica DaMassa:

It is.

Matthew Holt:

You’re a poet.

Jessica DaMassa:

Remember the meltdown that started this? When you were like, “Everybody just makes fun of me.” And I had to talk you down off of that emotional roller coaster, because the star of the show needs to be in a good mental health space. Remember all that?

Matthew Holt:

I have no recollection of any of this stuff. But I’m wondering whether we use the intro that you did properly, or when I do the edit later, will I use the one that I did, which was much better?

Jessica DaMassa:

No, I like my intro better.

Matthew Holt:

All right, all right, all right. Are we ready to get to the show?

Jessica DaMassa:

Yes.

Matthew Holt:

Go on then.

Jessica DaMassa:

Oh my god. You go on then. With that– great big fat news. Thirty Madison and Nurx have merged.

Matthew Holt:

Wow. Okay. Well, this is a big one. Thirty Madison, which is J&J backed, and others, has a… How much did they raise? Like 150, 100 and… 200 million? Big number. They are a specialty-

Jessica DaMassa:

More than that.

Matthew Holt:

More than that? They’re a specialty online pharmacy competitor to Hims, Ro, and the rest of it. Nurex or NewRx or Nurx, depending on what you called it. I think when it launched at Health 2.0 we called it Nurx. We didn’t know how to pronounce it. Combined, they have 750,000 patients, about $300 million in revenue. They’re going to get rid of that Nurx brand, so we don’t have to figure out how to pronounce it any more.

Matthew Holt:

I don’t know how many of these big pharmacy companies there are, but they clearly think there’s room for… enough. We’ll see.

Jessica DaMassa:

I have the differentiating factor in the interview I did with their new CEO.

Matthew Holt:

All right.

Jessica DaMassa:

Concerto Health acquires Crown Health. Tell me about this, Mr. Holt.

Matthew Holt:

This is home care. People building teams to get into the home and do physician type stuff and clinical stuff in the house. It’s happening all over the place. By the way, I didn’t realize that Dispatch Health is in this as well, in the hospital, and the home space, as well as everywhere else. Concerto Health raised so much money, acquired Crown health, which is another company doing the same sort of thing in Northwest.

Jessica DaMassa:

All right. Kindbody buys Vios Fertility Institute.

Matthew Holt:

Same thing. What happened there, one fertility clinic chain, with some platform, bought another one. I think they’re up to 30, 40 clinics now. Fertility’s a big deal for some reason

Jessica DaMassa:

Calm merges with Ripple Health. That’s interesting.

Matthew Holt:

Don’t understand that at all. Huge meditation company, Calm, merges with a startup that’s just got kind of a caregiver app? No idea what this is about, other than maybe they’re acting hard to get, because the CEO of Ripple is taking over Calm. Michael Acton Smith is probably going back to his Moshi Monsters in London.

Jessica DaMassa:

Withings buys 8fit.

Matthew Holt:

This is an interesting deal here, actually. 8fit is worth about 10 million. It is a bunch of online workout classes, things. Maybe they were a bit late in the pandemic, with Peleton and some of these other guys going down, because people are now are going to the actually gym. I don’t know. But it’s in Germany, of course. So who knows what the hell is going on there.

Matthew Holt:

But they were doing about seven million in revenues. It’s a real company. And Withings has the scale and the devices all that. I don’t quite get the integration. But Withings has done this kind of stuff before, sold itself to Nokia and then bought itself back at a much cheaper price. Maybe.

Jessica DaMassa:

Interesting.

Matthew Holt:

A maybe on that one. Yeah. The one I really don’t get is the Calm one. I mean…

Jessica DaMassa:

Yeah.

Matthew Holt:

They seem to have nothing to do with each other, other than… So, you don’t know this, but Michael Acton Smith is actually a really good friend of my brother-in-law in the UK. He came out here to start Calm with the guy whose name I can’t remember, but the guy who did the million dollar webpage, which is the cleverest thing you’ve ever heard of… Are you too young for that?

Jessica DaMassa:

Maybe.

Matthew Holt:

This guy put up… I’ll have to Google his name… He put up a webpage

Jessica DaMassa:

Isn’t Google the million dollar webpage?

Matthew Holt:

Yeah. Well, you could buy a pixel on the page for a dollar. And there are a million pixels. He sold tiny ads,] ads. And he sold the whole page and kept it up for 10 years. He was a student, made a million dollars off this thing. It was genius. Other than his cost of putting it up. So by the end, people were buying squares like crazy, and lots of people went to it . I wonder if it’s still up. I should go look at it after the show. Anyway, he was the other guy in Calm. Ripple, a new company, hasn’t done much. Got a couple applications for Enterprise Caregiving. Baffled as to why it- [crosstalk 00:05:47]

Jessica DaMassa:

Maybe they want their tech.

Matthew Holt:

Maybe. I mean, who knows what they’re doing.

Jessica DaMassa:

I mean, if they’ve got a platform that’s maybe got a telehealth infrastructure to it, maybe they want their tech in order to reach into…

Matthew Holt:

But if you’re Calm… you look at Headspace, which acquired Ginger, or merged with Ginger- It’s got a real mental health part. And Calm has been doing very well, or was doing very well, I haven’t the latest numbers, growing very fast with their meditation app. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. The Ginger-Headspace thing makes sense, right?

Jessica DaMassa:

Yeah, because of the care.

Matthew Holt:

This is interesting. Whereas the other ones we talked about are all basically buying customers, and buying brand extension, and buying… The Thirty Madison-Nurx and that sort of thing, it’s the same thing. Nurx has got the…

Jessica DaMassa:

This is really interesting, though. Actually, they are doubling the number of conditions. Thirty Madison, with the addition of Nurx, is doubling the number of conditions that they’re able to offer. And it’s the platform play that they’re obviously that they’re trying to go for, focused on specialty here.

Jessica DaMassa:

So I interviewed, like I said, Steve Gutentag, who’s the CEO now of Thirty Madison, will be the CEO of the entire combined entity. And one of the best answers I’ve heard to a question about who they compete with and how they stand apart, I asked him about how they’re different than Ro & Rory, and Hims & Hers, and he was just like, “We are about longitudinal specialist care.” As opposed to just replacing primary care where it’s like one visit, let’s prescribe the drugs, they’ve got a whole platform built along this more longitudinal approach.

Matthew Holt:

That’s because the drugs don’t work. So if you take one shot of Viagra, apparently it works, but if you put one slap of the baldness stuff on, that they have at Keeps

Jessica DaMassa:

That is not true.

Matthew Holt:

You need to come back just to… I’m kidding.

Jessica DaMassa:

Are you a byproduct of the failure of this? Is that what you’re trying to say to me? It clearly did not work.

Matthew Holt:

I have clearly never been a customer of any of these baldness…

Jessica DaMassa:

Oh, well, then I think you should stop.

Matthew Holt:

Or should I start? Should I become a customer?

Jessica DaMassa:

I don’t know. I think you should stop. I think you should stop.

Matthew Holt:

I just moved where my hair was, from here to here.

Jessica DaMassa:

Well, that’s okay.

Matthew Holt:

All right. Well, now we’re being ridiculous. This whole show has been. So we should probably get off it.

Jessica DaMassa:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Matthew Holt:

Before we become the victim of a hostile takeover M&A and get put out of business. Which could be any minute.

Jessica DaMassa:

You know what we didn’t do, that we’re going to need to do next episode? By listener/viewer request, your buddy Ian Morrison wanted us to do a mashup of who do we think is going to be the two companies that merge together next. Can I put you on the spot? You got a guess? Or you want to think about it and come back next time?

Matthew Holt:

I think Medable will buy a big CRO.

Jessica DaMassa:

Oh. That’s not very splashy.

Matthew Holt:

All right. I think that… You asked me on the spot.

Jessica DaMassa:

I wanted splashy.

Matthew Holt:

They’re buying of little things at the moment, maybe they’ll want to buy a big thing. I don’t know.

Jessica DaMassa:

All right.

Matthew Holt:

They’re kind of like if AOL buys Time Warner

Jessica DaMassa:

TransCarent buys Omada.

Matthew Holt:

Why the hell would they do that?

Jessica DaMassa:

I don’t know. I’m joking. Splashy.

Matthew Holt:

That would be splashy.

Jessica DaMassa:

Headline-grabbing.

Matthew Holt:

Headline-grabbing.

Jessica DaMassa:

I don’t know. All right. For more news that’s not news, follow along with us over there on Twitter. I’m @jessdamassa, he is @boltyboy, and to never miss an episode of Health Tech Deals, sign up for our email newsletter over there at thehealthcareblog.com. The end. Oh, nice lazy pointing there. Drink more coffee, Mama. We’ll see you guys next time. Bye.