Doubling Down on H1: Menlo Co-Leads Series B, Eight Months After Leading Series A
By: Menlo Ventures
Tags: Venture Capital, Healthcare, SaaS, Funding, Data

Greg Yap, Partner at Menlo Ventures @grgyap

JP Sanday, Partner at Menlo Ventures @jpsanday

H1 is a unique healthcare data SaaS company with proprietary data, compelling initial applications, and potential to expand

In April 2020, Menlo led the Series A in H1 Insights. Now, eight months later, we’re back to co-lead the Series B together with IVP. As you might expect, raising two rounds in less than a year requires that a company have great momentum and multiple new investors looking to join the syndicate. Even so, it’s not often that we lead consecutive rounds. But as H1’s first venture investor, we already believed in the H1 team and business, and we wanted to expand our support.

H1 combines unique data and an expanding platform of applications to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies to improve key decisions. H1 has built what we believe to be the most comprehensive and highest quality database on healthcare professionals, now covering over 9 million individuals at more than 16,000 institutions in over 70 countries. By gathering and curating global data directly, H1 offers data and enables insights that other companies cannot. H1’s products are being deployed by medical affairs, clinical, and commercial teams in pharmaceutical and biotech customers for a growing variety of applications, including mapping key physicians to partner with for publications, education, clinical trials, and product launches. Mapping these key opinion leaders historically required manual, territory-specific primary research, often by teams of consultants. H1 automates this essential but time-consuming workflow — this is a common theme across Menlo investments.

When we started working with H1, we could already see early evidence of product-market fit, including both early “beachhead” pharma deals and good logo velocity in smaller biotechs. Feedback from customers was stellar, both in terms of product value and commitment to customer success by the H1 team. One of our diligence intros even turned into a multi-million dollar customer and investor. But H1 was clearly still at an early stage of maturity for supporting large demanding enterprise customers. Now, at the Series B, H1 has ramped up execution, winning 13 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies as customers and meeting top-tier venture metrics in gross retention, net retention, and sales efficiency. The company has quadrupled headcount and grown revenue rapidly, even during the pandemic (no COVID tailwinds here).

We invest in entrepreneurs as much as technologies, and cofounders Ariel Katz and Ian Sax have been an amazing team to support. At Menlo, we work as a team — in H1’s case, Greg as lead and board member, Jordan as talent partner helping Ariel build his executive team, Houman as business development partner helping with customer and partner intros, Tiffany’s support on PR and marketing, and now JP as the lead from our Inflection Fund and board observer after helping Ariel strategize and prepare for the Series B.

Ariel Katz, CEO

Ian Sax, Co Founder

All of us have enjoyed working with Ariel and the entire team at H1. They are passionate about building great solutions that delight customers and make them more successful. We are excited to go “all in” with H1 to help them continue to accelerate their growth in building out diverse applications and expanding globally.