California may be the nation’s hot spot for tech companies—but if a tech company also deals in physical products, Indiana starts to look a lot more attractive.
Just ask Prevounce Health, a growing med-tech startup, which moved to Indianapolis from Los Angeles last fall. The company recently landed $4.5 million in Series A funding and has big expansion plans here, including doubling its current staff of 19 within the next few months.
“The plans for scaling this are pretty high,” said Prevounce cofounder and CEO Dan Tashnek, a Los Angeles native.
The company launched in Los Angeles in 2019 as a pure software company, providing a platform that health providers can use to remotely monitor patients with chronic health conditions. But then the company expanded into hardware, partnering with a manufacturer to provide customers with internet-connected blood pressure cuffs, thermometers, scales and the like. At that point, being in California didn’t make as much sense any more.
Because Prevounce ships its products to users around the country, Tashnek said, the company wanted to move to a more central location. It considered Texas, Tennessee and Indiana before settling on Indiana—the company already had two employees living in Indianapolis and it found the business climate here appealing.
The availability of labor and affordable real estate were also issues in Indianapolis’ favor, Tashnek said.
The company relocated in October and now has its headquarters at 3250 N. Post Road on the city’s northeast side.
In another shift for the company, it’s pivoted from being a remote-first workplace to one that’s more workplace-focused.
“We want the vast majority of the folks that we are hiring to be based here,” Tashnek said.
Prevounce’s devices are meant to be very simple for patients to use, which means product design is important. That work involves collaboration with coworkers and physical access to the devices, Tashnek said. And all of that is much easier to do when colleagues are working together in person.
The company’s initial focus was on Medicare patients, in part because Tashnek’s background is as a health care attorney with a specialty in Medicare regulatory law. His two co-founders include a tax attorney and a developer.
When the pandemic hit, the resulting explosion in telemedicine boosted Prevounce’s growth trajectory.
The company currently has about 450 doctors using its products to monitor about 11,000 patients around the country. Customers range from medical practices and hospital systems to in-house employee health clinics to insurance providers that offer “virtual-first” at-home health care programs.
Prevounce doesn’t have any Indianapolis customers yet, but Tashnek said the company is hoping to change that. “We want to have a big presence here.”
The company’s initial funding came from Tashnek and his two co-founders. The company recently raised its first outside funding recently, in a $4.5 million Series A round from a group of angel investors. Tashnek said the company plans to use that funding to scale up, doubling its workforce within the next two months.
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If tech companies in California, Seattle and San Francisco were smart, they would all think about relocating here. No, Indy can’t provide the scenic, panoramic look and sites but the quality of life is excellent when you add, cost of living, traffics issues and taxes, Indy starts to look more and more attractive.