Rezilient Summit 2025 Board Panel

At our 2025 Inaugural Healthcare Summit in St. Louis in early August, Danish Nagda, Rezilient CEO and Co-Founder was joined by Erica Murdock from Unseen Capital, Rob Panepinto from GOVO Venture Partners, and Clint Jones from Bridge Ventures, all of whom are on Rezilient's board.

In case you missed our Summit, catch the whole discussion on the video below and in the transcript.

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Danish Nagda

We are very lucky to have a board full of founders. It is incredibly valuable because there is a level of empathy for the growing pains. Some of you here are directly witnessing our growth and everybody always thinks, numbers going up, everything's going great, it's so awesome.

It is tough to grow without sacrificing quality and outcomes and experience. It is tough to grow this quickly without the support of incredible board members that will sometimes tell me what I don't want to hear, which is actually harder, some of the employees here know. And I think it's a testament to the folks that we have, as we were thinking about our board, we really wanted people around the table that have actually built something.

Having people that have actually built before around the table makes a huge impact. So thank you to you all for coming here. Really appreciate your time.

I'm going to start with Erica. Unseen Capital was an early investor in Rezilient, and then our managing partner at Unseen Capital actually passed away. Erica has had to take over.

We have had the opportunity to build a really strong relationship, a little bit through pain. But there's other pain that's out there as well, which is the pain of digital health. For people that don't know, digital health is not doing so great as an industry.

A lot of companies are struggling in this space. And we happen to be doing really well. But overall, in digital health, as you all are active investors in digital health, what are you most excited about right now?

Erica Murdock

For me, the most exciting thing is companies that are really driving outcomes and focusing on quality. In my tenure in digital health, which somehow spans 20 years, we were given a lot of capital to do a lot of things really early, not necessarily with goalposts in mind or targets and milestones.

Some of those early successes resulted in early failures. We were running very quickly, moving to be ahead of the curve and thinking of ourselves as true disruptors, where we were just breaking things and then working to fix it. What I really like is that I'm seeing now is there's a lot of intentionality behind what people are building and the focus on what actually matters, which is getting patients better and making sure they have that high quality service that maybe they're not getting in their traditional health systems.

Danish

When we were talking about presenting our clinical outcomes, people would ask us the question: why? Why even share your clinical outcomes publicly? Usually companies don't do that in the digital health space. It's very rare, actually.

It was because we wanted to put a flag in the ground and say: this is what matters to us most. Who cares about revenue if you're not delivering outcomes? It’s a testament to the team.

Rob was also an early investor in Rezilient. He's seen things break a little. What is the biggest change you've seen in Jeff and myself and the company since you've invested?

Rob Panepinto

First of all, there weren't nearly as many people as there are right now.

We only had the one clinic in St. Louis, so there must have been maybe a dozen people at the time? We're going back, we're going back three years. So I think the growth, obviously has been very impressive.

Erica asked me before, we have 12 portfolio companies, any other companies do this type of event? I said, no. So it's a testament at this stage of the company, actually, we're doing this and bringing folks out. I actually think what's great is what hasn't changed.

Part of the reason we invested in you and Jeff was, you clearly had a vision for what you wanted to do. There was a mission and a heart to it, right, which we saw at the beginning.

But you were always open to feedback. And we're comfortable with the idea that, you don't know what you don't know. You're willing to listen, which at an early stage for an investor, honestly, that's one of the biggest things we look for.

Because things do change. And this business has changed. A lot of our growth strategy now is very different than the drivers of the growth strategy, even nine months ago, or six months ago, or 12 months ago, which is the nature of where we are in healthcare. The fact that you guys have always been at your core very fixed around the type of company you wanted to build, and the mission of it and the value of it, while then adapting it to the marketplace as it changes is a very unique conversation, because it's very easy to be caught by the shiny penny and lose why you started the company, right?

Danish

We had a conversation this morning about how much time our providers spend with the patients. That's going to get harder and harder as the company grows and scales.

But in the conversation, the board was not pushing us to reduce the time we spent with patients at all. It wasn't even a conversation, because I think Thomas and Jeff have said, it's a non-negotiable, which the board clearly supports.

Rob

So to me, it really isn't so much about what's changed. The things that have changed are the things we would hope would change, which is why we make these investments. At the core of it, what you guys are trying to do and what you what you're trying to build and how you're building it is actually pretty consistent over the last years, which I think is wonderful and not always true.

Danish

It's something that we think a lot about: what's the easiest way to improve margins in healthcare? Less time with patients. That is a non-negotiable. So I hope that the people here that serve patients are happy knowing that we will not we will not negotiate on that.

The good thing is our board was so happy because one of the biggest things that happen to companies as they're scaling, the values change. You know what happens to companies whose values change? They end up making Netflix movies about them. Not good ones. And while I'm curious to see who would play me – I bet Hassan Minhaj – but it's not the direction we want to go.

I want to ask Clint specifically, as a successful founder turned investor, he is the most recent investor on our cap table. I'm interested to hear what attracted you to investing in Rezilient?

Clint Jones

I was an operator for 20 years, and I didn’t have a lot of experience investing in companies. But I looked around a lot of friends that have built successful companies. What was the DNA of a lot of those businesses and why were they successful? It really came down to what I consider three things: we call them the three M's management, market and momentum.

When I had a first call with Jeff and Danish, I'm like, Oh, these guys have a lot of passion for this business. At the time, I didn't fully understood what you did and how you delivered.

But I just saw the passion. It was on a Zoom call, like oozing through the call on the phone. I could just see and hear what you guys had to say.

I said, I need to get down there and understand this clinic. I want to go touch and walk into a clinic and feel and see this live, which we did. And I saw that delivery model and it was really impressive. This could be a game changer. We all know that.

So the management checkbox was there. The market was there. This is a huge market, right? It's close to 20% of our GDP.

Momentum-wise, the pipeline, what was being built, the clinic, the delivery, some of the NPS scores and the outcomes that you're focused on was really, really impressive. I said, I've got to be a part of this and how can we do this? That's really what attracted me to it. And then seeing the team here today, hearing you echo multiple times in introductions, how you're praising your team and the team you've built and the culture you've built.

You don't see that a lot. Most early investing, probably eight out of 10 times, you're going to fail. Businesses are going to go under and a majority of those times, you've got the wrong leadership team in place.

Maybe it’s a great idea, maybe it’s a big market, cool technology, but execution is not there. What I've seen here is you're going to have bumps along the way and issues and roadblocks and things you didn't expect, but having a team that's resilient to get through those and navigate those channels and those challenges is critical. And I think you've got that.

Danish

There's something really big happening in healthcare: there was like a big, beautiful bill that just passed. It is very healthcare focused, some would say as big towards the healthcare industry as Obamacare was.

Govo Ventures are specifically interested in how government affects their startup companies. That was the thesis the whole time, and I think that that's why they're on the cap table. They're one of our big investors.

We've been so close to Rob, who has served as a personal mentor. But even with the big, beautiful bill, how do you think that affects healthcare overall? And what are the tailwinds for Rezilient.

Rob

First of all, whenever I'm asked to comment on policy, please understand, there's no political statement here whatsoever. Like, I am not questioning from either side of the aisle whether the policy is good, wise.

At the level we're having this conversation, it is an irrelevant point, right? It's really about what it means from a business perspective. In my own company, which is in healthcare, the important role government plays, I can literally tie when we did our private equity transaction and when we sold the company to changes in federal government healthcare policy. We raised private equity capital because the Bush administration created Medicare Part D. And we got bought by UnitedHealthcare because of Obamacare.

There is no ifs, ands, or buts, which is why Danish pays attention to it. It's not just from the perspective, obviously, of how you run the company, but it really does move markets, right, particularly if you're on the tailwind of it.

In this case, Rezilient is on the tailwind for several reasons. What most of you have heard about the one big beautiful buzz that relates to healthcare is just how much Medicaid has been cut back. That's the one that has made the most news.

Combined with the changes to Obamacare, which again, interestingly, you see how long it also takes government policy to change. There's been an effort, which many of you have been aware of, to sort of gut Obamacare almost since the time it passed. This bill, to some extent, guts quite a lot of it in a way that really changes the market.

And again, no judgment on the policy. The net result of those two things change the dynamic both for payers and providers in a major, in a way, for the health systems. And that's why I said our strategy today is a little different than we said a year ago, because health systems, while they were an important part of Rezilient, but not necessarily a strategic driver for our growth had we been sitting here a year ago.

They are a strategic driver for our growth now because the changes in that law have created a dynamic where the providers need to look at their entire book of business, how they get paid, and there's a real desire to have more employer-based lives that they are serving. And clearly, Rezilient is a huge on-ramp and easy access to be able to do that. So at the macro level, that's really important.

The other two things are sort of more financial mechanics, which just support this. One thing they didn't touch is 340B reimbursement, which they could have. They didn't.

To some extent they did give providers a little bit of a lifeline while they were doing all these other things that made it harder for them. That also creates another on-ramp for Rezilient because our ability to help folks navigate through that process and put them on certain medications, there's benefit to the hospital system. Also, since COVID and leading up into this bill, there's been a lot of legislation that has made telehealth or hybrid care much more attractive from a financial standpoint.

To be in a position where HSA dollars and first dollar coverage is covered for things that are hybrid or telehealth is another financial incentive to use Rezilient. So one, I think in these sorts of changes, companies that are innovators and disruptors do well. Those are the types of companies we look for.

There are some very specific things that are happening right now that I think create huge tailwind for Rezilient over these next 12, 24, 36 months. Beyond that, we’ll certainly see where it goes. There's a really unique opportunity in time here, which reminds me of what happened to us during Medicare Part D. We went from 25 million to 65 million in the span of 18 months, purely because of that change. Those are some of the dynamics that are existing in the marketplace right now to the benefit of, it creates an enormous amount of pressure for us to move very quickly and execute, which is why it's wonderful to have this team here and all of you on board with us.

Danish

I'm sure you're all hearing this and asking yourself, man, is healthcare complex. It is.

The tailwinds that he's talking about, we're having these conversations with leaders in our community who are running the local health systems who are saying that without Medicaid revenue, like they're going to cut Medicaid by $321 billion. Most of that is in the rural health systems over 10 years. If you're a rural hospital, your margins were already so tiny.

Now suddenly those Medicaid patients are uninsured patients. They come through the emergency room. A lot of the medics will tell you, you have to take care of them, which is a good thing in America, right? That we don't say no to people at the emergency room based on their insurance status.

But now that cost is being borne by the health system when before they were getting paid for that patient. Rural health systems in America are at real risk. Rezilient could help them not only for their own employees, but also help connect them to their local employers. This is a huge opportunity.

One other question for you. You know, we're talking about the complexity of this bill.

Obviously, it all depends on what the next week is going to be from our president. But overall, what are your thoughts in terms of digital health as a whole? First dollar coverage is not just a Rezilient thing. It's a digital thing.

But since the pandemic ended, and we are in our current state, how are you thinking about because you guys do a lot of digital health investments, all digital health. How are you thinking about digital health investments now?

Erica

I'll build on what both Clint and Rob talked about, which is around the markets and the tailwinds. What the pandemic did was really open up the lens on telehealth.

It's been around for over a decade. It's just been underutilized. The pandemic uncapped this opportunity where people now were forced into telehealth and really thinking about how they utilize it.

What it did for the existing companies, some of which have gone public recently, is forced them to sort of scale up quickly. And what it's done for the rest of the market is drive innovation. Now, you have all these solutions that have come to market, whether it's in behavioral mental health, primary care, general virtual health, other segments, women's health, you can name it, there's a segment for it.

The adoption is there, people want this, they're using it, the commercial population, which is people like us, people who are working, are the ones who are gravitating towards some of these more digitally-enabled solutions. And so for us on the investment side, it's a matter of identifying how we can be one step ahead of tailwinds, which is virtually impossible, but we do our best. Thinking about where the market is going, what are the opportunities, not just for to build a scalable business, but something that will actually sustain growth across multiple markets.

So you may be in one vertical today, but can you expand to additional verticals? Or are there opportunities for consolidation? Keeping a pulse on the market, talking to consumers, talking to patients, talking to employers, to brokers, to systems, we ourselves are in the market so that we can be smarter and not only understand what's happening, but also help educate our portfolio companies and our founders as well. So that's something that we try to do. I am one person on my team, but I am surrounded by eight people who are just engaged and invested in this themselves.

And so we pride ourselves in all being former operators. And so coming to the board and to the team and being able to support and help and advise, it helps make us smarter. But again, we bring that back to the table as well.

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See full recaps of all the panel discussions from our 2025 Inaugural Healthcare Summit on our blog.