Go2Nurse Registers Offering with SEC
CHICAGO – March 9, 2015 – According to Forbes Magazine, there is a “War for Talent” emerging from healthcare reform in the U.S. (See: http://tinyurl.com/l2q9p2v). Chicago area startup Go2Nurse, Inc. (www.Go2Nurse.com) seeks to cure this pain and capitalize on the nascent huge demand for infantry in this war by becoming “The Uber of Nursing,” according to its CEO Meg J. P. Kubiak, a registered nurse and health education author. The Company recently registered a convertible debt offering paying 8% interest with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (see: http://tinyurl.com/p9tg6o9).
“The Uber business model will soon come to healthcare,” wrote Stuart Karten, Principal of Karten Design (www.kartendesign.com), a product innovation consultancy, in a recently published article. “Just as Uber changed transportation in positive—and sometimes controversial—ways, healthcare will be infiltrated by startups wanting to change the healthcare model from hospital-centric to patient-centric. Medical device companies and other healthcare providers that don’t realize that a major shift is taking place will become the equivalent of today’s taxi industry,” says Karten (see: http://tinyurl.com/mjsapc2).
Kubiak agrees. “Nurses have long been at the center of care logistics and implementation, acting as patient advocates while physicians have made the important decisions. What we are doing with Go2Nurse is placing care coordination and all of its logistics, entirely in the hands of patients and their nurses, via our smartphone app. There is no substitute for licensed medical doctors but their time is becoming more and more constrained and wasted these days on ‘paperwork,’ electronic and actual paper that does nothing to cure patient ills. There is a huge cost in real dollars for this wasted physician time and Go2Nurse intends to vaporize these unnecessary costs through a proprietary leap in technology.”
According to Kubiak, her company started producing revenue by servicing an Illinois Medicaid-funded HMO, a “Coordinated Care Entity” (CCE) in ObamaCare parlance. Go2Nurse serves the CCE with registered nurses who act as case managers, becoming the central point of contact for enrollees in Medicare, Medicaid and ACA-created healthcare organizations. “Our CCE client serves far south portions of Cook County” says Kubiak. “In this population there is a sizeable proportion of Spanish speakers. Our Go2Nurse app has a really cool, fun and useful feature for these folks, among many others. When needed, Go2Nurse can translate back and forth, in synthesized voices, out loud, from English to Spanish and back. It’s not just limited to these languages however.
‘There are currently 51 languages in our library. If a nurse needs to ask a question like “How long have you been taking blood thinners?” for example, the nurse speaks that question out loud, in English, into his or her Go2Nurse app-equipped Android phone and out comes “¿Cuánto tiempo ha estado tomando anticoagulantes" in a pleasant female voice through the smartphone speaker. Some of the languages are translated only in writing, as we update and improve our capabilities”.
Go2Nurse’s securities offering is made under SEC Regulation D, Rule 506(c), The JOBS Act and is available only to accredited investors. HealthiosXchange is acting as listing agent.
New nursing care models are cropping up around the United States. In New Mexico there is a NurseAdvice call center which mirrors some but not all of Go2Nurse’s functions, see: http://tinyurl.com/p6bxfef. “This field is a hotbed of creativity and unplowed territory” said Kubiak, who cites Dr. Eric Topol’s book “The Creative Destruction of Medicine” as a source of inspiration for Go2Nurse.
FUNDING CHALLENGES
“Chicago is among the wealthiest global cities” says Scott Jordan, Vice President of online finance platform HealthiosExchange (http://www.healthiosxchange.com). “There are hundreds of billions invested from this area every year. But … many investors are more Series B than Series A meaning they have a risk-averse appetite. If companies are seeking early-stage capital (~seed money), the Midwest is a challenging region to raise the funding. At Healthios we recognized this and created HealthiosExchange, an investment marketplace where companies like Go2Nurse can connect with high net worth ‘accredited’ investors. Companies can leverage 506(c) of the JOBS Act to market offerings to investors without previous relationships on the portal if they submit documentation to the SEC. Once filed, company offerings are marketed to “the public” in our “Funding Now” portal and highlighted in member/deal newsletters. Go2Nurse is there now.”
Kubiak says that Go2Nurse is globally scalable. “There are about 2.5 million licensed nurses in the United States who are not employed in the nursing profession. Many are young parents focused on their children. Other nurses are simply weary of the old order, where institutions and senior providers take advantage of their natural demeanors as caregivers and then burnout eventually comes. Go2nurse and its app move the fulcrum of control to nurses and their patients. It’s a far more satisfying way to live one’s daily life and profession than the conventional clinical environment. Two million nurses with 20 patients each can care for every person in the United States and the projected population for the next 20 years.”
As for thinking big, Kubiak says “Our Go2Nurse app is already multilingual and multicultural. There are more than 2 billion smartphones in the world and almost everybody holding one is a prospective client for us. Show me a person with a smartphone who’ll never need a nurse and I’ll show you someone buried with their smartphone.”
As for building a company in Chicago without regard to the availability of early stage capital, Kubiak says “Once you get past a certain development stage, Chicago transforms from “Valley of Death” backwater to the global city it bills itself to be. I am a clinician. What gets me up in the morning is healing patients and bringing babies into the world. My co-founders are technologists and medical doctors. As we raise this first outside capital round we are on the lookout for directors and seasoned managers from large enterprises around Chicago. Companies like Google, Abbvie, Allscrips, Walgreens etc., should be good sources for senior Go2Nurse management at the right time.’
‘We foresee a meaningful exit opportunity starting about 2018. From our point of view, our business model is imbued with all the sustainability we could ask for. There are plethora companies entering this space and many have truly great ideas and technology. Sustainability is the key to return on capital for investors and we have it. We produce revenue by selling in a time-honored, conventional, direct ‘wholesale’ way and we do not reply upon a huge marketing budget per client.”
According to Kubiak, Go2Nurse has a book of business that already exceeds its 2015 revenue forecast. “We expect to be making an announcement in the very near future that makes this clear” she says.
The Go2Nurse app is available on Google’s Play Store and Amazon’s Kindle Store as a Kindle app. Part of the company’s use of proceeds in its current financing round, is to port Go2Nurse over to iOS phones, tablets and perhaps also, the coming Apple Watch. Years down the road according to Kubiak, is a cloud service called NurseFlo, an artificially intelligent online and app-linked avatar that, according to Kubiak, is intended to speak to patients in their chosen language and “triage” cases for handoff to real, live people. A company called Sense.ly located in San Francisco (there’s that West Coast problem again) recently raised $1.25 million in capital from accelerator Launchpad Digital Health, Eastlink Capital Management, and five angel investors. According to MobiHealth News (http://tinyurl.com/p4ylvmz) Sense.ly was incubated at European mobile operator Orange and spun out as an independent company in 2014.
According to the New York Times’ Deal Book, the Uber car sharing service recently raised $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation (see http://tinyurl.com/kvrkl5q). Go2Nurse’s post-money valuation as expressed in its private placement memorandum, is about $2.5 million on a fully diluted, fully converted basis, after the Company’s Series A convertible debentures are converted, if converted at sole option of investors, said Kubiak. Go2Nurse’s debentures pay an 8% current yield on a note due in 12 months. The Company’s $1 million offering is made in units of $1,000 each of which $960 is the note portion and $40 purchases warrants. The $960 is repaid in 12 months and Go2Nurse expects that most investors will convert their debt into shares or warrants.
Accredited investors interested in receiving a copy of Go2Nurse’s private placement memorandum (PPM) should send a request directly to Kubiak via email to: meg@go2Nurse.com or register with HealthiosExchange. Those first registered with Healthios at www.healthiosxchange.com, may reserve their place in Go2Nurse’s offering. Any and all inquirers wishing to receive a copy of the Company’s PPM must first sufficiently represent to the Company that they are in fact accredited investors under the SEC’s definition, which may be viewed here at Investopedia.com: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp
ABOUT Healthios
(See Healthios website: http://www.healthiosxchange.com/pages/who-we-are)
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Go2Nurse contact: Meg J. P. Kubiak, RN, BSN: meg@go2nurse.com
Kubiak LinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/malgorzata-meg-kubiak/88/5b1/59a/
Go2Nurse SEC CIK Number: 0001635130
Healthios Contact: Scott Jordan, Vice President: sjordan@healthios.com
Jordan LinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/sjordan1