13 February 2022 |

A New Healthcare Startup Trend: Consolidation

By workweek

Specialty care telehealth platform Thirty Madison will merge with women-focused healthcare company Nurx (link). Given the digital health market is oversaturated with companies, this merger may mark the beginning of a new M&A trend in the digital health space.

The Deets
Thirty Madison is a specialty care company focusing on chronic conditions. The company provides care for hair loss (Keeps), migraines (Cove), gut issues (Evens) and allergies (Picnic). One area Thirty Madison hasn’t explored until now is women’s health. That’s where Nurx comes in. Nurx provides easy access to birth control and offers other products (for all genders) such as HIV PrEP medication and STI tests.

Through this merger, Thirty Madison will double the number of patients under its care (Nurx is bringing 750k patients) and double the number of conditions the company treats. Thirty Madison looks to be the leading virtual specialty firm in the U.S. The deal’s financial aspects are unknown, but Thirty Madison said it expects to bring in $300M in revenue this year.

A New Trend
I discussed several weeks ago digital health’s funding boom in 2021—$29.1B total dollars (link). Some think we’re living in a digital health bubble, where companies are overfunded and overvalued (link). And there are a lot of digital health companies, many of which are creating similar solutions to similar problems causing the market to be oversaturated. So what happens when a market is oversaturated with only a few key dominant players? Consolidation.

It’s not surprising that health tech investor Chrissy Farr tweeted this in response to the merger:

Stay on the lookout for a new trend of M&A in the digital health space. I think the consolidation movement may help build a few companies doing great things instead of many companies doing good things. Maybe Thirty Madison will be one of those great companies.