Sherpaa raises $2.25M for its text messaging service

Sherpaa

New York City-based Sherpaa has raised $2.25 million as an amendment to its last year’s $4 million round, bringing the company’s total funding to at least $8 million.

Among Sherpaa’s investors are O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, First Round Capital, Collaborative Fund, and a number of angels like Tumblr’s David Karp and John Maloney, and OpenX and Jirafe founder Scott Switzer.

The company makes physicians remotely available to employees, helping its clients cut their healthcare costs. Employees can use Sherpaa’s app, the web, or a phone to communicate with doctors, who can respond on an array of medical issues and send prescriptions to a local pharmacy when appropriate.

Sherpaa thinks that video visits are not the thing most users want, arguing that “asynchronous, text-based communication is an ingrained behavior in humans.” We’re not sure we agree with this given the rise of services such as Teladoc, Doctor on Demand and AmWell.

In a recent interview with Wired, the company’s founder Dr. Jay Parkinson said that about 80% of employees opt in to the service, and 60% become regular users. He added that asynchronous text communication can solve about 70% of medical issues that employees have, and in the other 30% of cases – users are referred to a specialist for an in-person visit.

Sherpaa currently has about 100 clients, including Yahoo-owned Tumblr and Etsy.

[Via: mobihealthnews]