Dhrooti Vyas
Appearances
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
Yeah. So I am thinking about venture scale health care companies and those that have the potential to generate financial return on a seven to 10 year time frame and have the potential to exit for call it over 100 million dollar outcome. And it's very interesting when we think about healthcare startups.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
If you look at the traditional pathway of starting a startup, so for example, if you look at healthcare startups that go through Y Combinator, Y Combinator's overall realized moik on healthcare is that Somewhere between 1 and 2x, whereas in the consumer and fintech investments, that hovers closer to 7 to 8x.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
And if you look at the flip side, if you look at health care, health tech companies that have successfully exited for over $100 million since the passage of the ACA, and returned investor capital, it's some 17.5% of those are incubations or corporate spinoffs. Think companies like TrellisRx or Landmark Health.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
Some are slightly more complex stories, two entities that merged and then brought in some corporate backing. Progeny's story looks something like this. But, you know, when I think about these data points, my takeaways are twofold. One is that there's a lot of complexity to the American health care system.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
So it's hard for an entrepreneur in the wild to start a health tech startup and be successful. There's a lot of alpha to being able to be slow and considered in the early days of launching something new. And then the other takeaway is that there are a lot of places in the healthcare ecosystem where things are working quite well, but they're subscale. So this is the story of Trellis.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
This is hopefully our story with Crosswalk Health, the last company I incubated. And that makes me feel very bullish about incubations as a mechanism for scaling these companies that already are demonstrating great unit economics and viability.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
Thank you so much, Scott, and thank you for having me on. So as Scott said, I'm Driti. I'm a healthcare entrepreneur, builder, and investor. I most recently founded a value-based care enablement startup called Crosswalk Health, which helps EMS agencies get compensated for the high-impact, often invisible care they deliver in the community.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
Yeah. So incubating, I would say, means bringing together the ingredients necessary to create a great company. So that includes the concept behind the company, some initial capital, a great CEO and founding team to lead it and scale it, and a general kind of go-to-market playbook that the company can follow to grow. It's really hard for all of these elements to come together themselves.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
So creating kind of a contained environment that brings them together.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
Wow, that's a toughie. I got to say my alma mater. I don't know what else to say, Scott. You didn't go to business school, did you?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
Yeah, so Crosswalk helps EMS agencies get compensated for the value that they're delivering in their communities. So the story behind Crosswalk is like the 911 system has effectively become the default social safety net for our communities. but it isn't paid for that. So in the process of incubating Crosswalk, I visited maybe 10 or so EMS agencies around the country.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
And it's so fascinating to be in an ambulance with a paramedic or an EMT. I highly recommend it to anyone that's building solutions for vulnerable communities. But you're in the ambulance, most of your time is spent waiting for the next call. And when the next call comes in, it's often not a medical emergency.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
So some of the calls that I had the privilege of writing along for included, you know, a woman that had stomach pain for seven days. She couldn't get a primary care appointment. Her local urgent care wouldn't take her insurance. So she called 911. Someone that had fallen and couldn't get back up and then we dug into it a bit more.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
It turned out they'd fallen because they couldn't pay their utility bill and they couldn't see. You also have stories of people that encounter an unhoused individual on the street and they call 911 and, you know, all that EMS today gets compensated for doing is transporting those individuals to the emergency department, but
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
EMS agencies around the country are trying to solve this problem on their own. So they've become some mix of care navigators, getting people enrolled in Medicaid, trying to fix the utility bill problem, et cetera, et cetera. But they're not getting paid for it. Yeah.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
I'm now working on something new, but today I'll tell you about Crosswalk, and then I'll tell you a bit about what I've learned about building venture-scale businesses in healthcare more broadly.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. You know, we estimated that something like 90% of 911 calls didn't actually need, or medical emergencies did not need transportation to the emergency department. And yeah, like EMS agencies are getting overwhelmed. And what that ends up doing is, you know, It takes longer to get to the people that do have true medical emergencies.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
So that's the problem that Crosswalk is solving, is getting EMS agencies connected to health insurance companies, to payers, to risk-bearing provider groups so that they can get compensated for for providing interventions in the community that stop the 911 call before it happens, right?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
Like that, make sure a utility bill is paid, make sure a person in the community has access to Meals on Wheels or whatever social services it is that they need. And, you know, yeah, just getting compensated for creating more healthful communities.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
You're flattering me. Oh, my God. I don't know if I can take all these compliments.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
I had a great time. I mean, yeah, like undergrad was just so fun exploring a bunch of different ideas. And it just it was really it was really a place to flourish. And business school was fun in a very different way. So I had a great time. Much love to the city of Chicago and its great universities.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
That's right.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
Thank you, Scott. Thanks so much for having me.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Dhrooti Vyas on Building Crosswalk Health and the Power of Healthcare Incubation 5-21-25
Yeah, so I am working on a new healthcare company creation platform. Healthcare incubations are a particularly fantastic way to commercialize innovation in this industry. And I can share some of the reasons why I am very bullish about this thesis and how we're thinking about it.