From left: Blue Heron’s Nick Graziano and Tom Benedetti, Remission Medical founder Blake Wehman, operating adviser Mark Rausch and Blue Heron Vice President Kevin Musco. (Jackie DiBartolomeo photo)
A 4-year-old Richmond-based telehealth company has just closed on its biggest capital influx to date, courtesy of a local investment firm.
Remission Medical, which offers virtual appointments for rheumatology care, recently closed on a $5 million investment from Scott’s Addition-based private equity firm Blue Heron Capital.
Announced today, the deal gives Remission added financing to expand its team and make a greater push in selling its services to other healthcare providers, founder Blake Wehman told BizSense.
And for Blue Heron, the deal is the latest sign of its growing interest in deploying capital to Richmond-based companies, firm co-founder and managing partner Tom Benedetti said.
Wehman founded Remission in 2022 after having rheumatoid arthritis himself and seeing long wait times to get referrals for appointments with rheumatologists.
The company’s initial business model was to act as its own telehealth clinic geared toward rheumatology patients, before fully pivoting by contracting its own practitioners and its workforce platform out to other healthcare providers. Remission’s medical staff meets virtually with patients and can order labs, imaging and prescriptions for them, all through the existing virtual portals, electronic health records, scheduling and billing of those other doctors’ offices.
Remission’s first two health system customers under that new model were Hampton Roads-based Sentara and Richmond-based OrthoVirginia, which the company signed on two years ago. It now has eight such contracts, with customers such as Louisiana-based Ochsner Health and Pennsylvania-based WellSpan Health.
Remission makes its money through a fee for services paid by those other providers.
Wehman told BizSense that the capital raised from Blue Heron will allow Remission to hire more people and scale up its workforce platform (called RemissionOS) to “go after more health systems,” particularly large-scale, independent clinics like OrthoVirginia.
“One application of the $5 million raise is to expand the team. That allows us to expand our mission, go and land more business-to-business contracts,” Wehman said.
The $5 million investment from Blue Heron brings Remission’s total funding from outside investors to around $6.2 million to date, having previously raised $1.2 million from angel investors.
Blake Wehman, founder of Remission Medical. (Courtesy Remission Medical)
Blue Heron bills itself as an early-stage growth equity fund, investing in companies typically with $2 million to $10 million in yearly revenue. Benedetti said the firm’s funds invest mainly in “second-tier” markets across the country where the capital to go around is a bit sparser, adding that it invests in companies from a range of industries, including healthcare.
The firm’s first fund launched in 2013, when Blue Heron made eight investments all in non-Richmond-area companies. A second fund in 2018 invested in nine non-Richmond companies. Those first two funds doled out about $25 million and $32 million, respectively.
In 2023, it closed Blue Heron Capital Fund III, raising $102 million. Remission Medical was the final investment to be made with Fund III.
Two other local companies received capital from Fund III: Blue Heron participated in a $11 million round for virtual autism therapy company AnswersNow and a $4.1 million round for accounting startup Cookie Finance.
“We were seeing Richmond starting to grow as a real place for innovation. … It appears that it has gotten to the point where, from our perspective, it’s really accelerating, and that’s exciting,” Benedetti said of the firm’s further investment in Richmond companies.
Remission’s plans for scaling up include the addition of some more nurse practitioners, physicians assistants and other incremental staff, along with marketing dollars.
“We see this capital as helping Blake and Remission cross that chasm to have a scalable platform without going through some of the painful or slow processes,” added Blue Heron Vice President Kevin Musco.
Along with the capital, the investment deal brings Mark Rausch to Remission’s board of directors through Blue Heron’s “OA Collaborative,” which pairs operating advisers with experience in the fields of the companies Blue Heron invests in.
Rausch also serves as the managing director of business development at Merritt Healthcare Advisors and is on the board of directors of Richmond-based Perfusion Medical.
Remission has already begun to grow its leadership team, adding chief growth officer Michael Spine, chief revenue officer Blake Siewert and bringing on formerly fractional chief technology officer Tyler Beard as a full-time employee.
Wehman said that just before the Blue Heron deal, Remission was “hovering at cash flow positivity,” but it is now focused more on growth than profitability.
“Right now, we just pour all of our profits back into growth,” he said.
Benedetti said he hopes Blue Heron’s interest and investment in local companies like Remission can be a sign that Richmond is a growing area for businesses.
“There is a support system here in Richmond that can convince people that growing companies in Richmond is a really great thing to do,” he said. “It feels like there’s more and more optionality for folks like Blake, and maybe that gets more people to move here. They don’t need to stay in D.C. or New York, they can come to Richmond.”
Wehman remains located in the Richmond area as he runs Remission. The company works virtually, with two members of the leadership team based in Virginia, while others are across the country. The company has six employees on its leadership team in addition to Wehman and 11 full-time nurse practitioners, as well as five to six naturopathic doctors that provide part-time services.
Blue Heron Capital was founded in 2006 by Benedetti and Andrew Tichenor and has a team of nine employees, per its website. The company is headquartered at 1806 Summit Ave. in Scott’s Addition.
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