Charging Into Healthcare's Billing Problem
The number that haunts every dental practice, medspa, and plastic surgeon's office is not the cost of equipment or the rent on a San Francisco lease. It is the percentage of patients who walk out the door when they hear the price. For years, that number hovered around 50%. Half of all prospective patients - people who needed and wanted care - left because financing was opaque, approval rates were punishing, or the terms felt like a trap. Chris Boudreaux, co-founder at Cherry, decided that number was unacceptable.
Cherry (withcherry.com) is the healthcare financing platform that put a 60-second application, a 90% approval rate, and zero-interest payment options in front of every patient sitting in a dentist chair, a medspa consultation room, or a veterinary waiting area. The result: providers report 30% more case acceptance, 50% larger average transaction sizes, and upfront payment in 2-3 business days - while patients pay over time at terms that don't feel exploitative.
Boudreaux operates at the commercial edge of that mission, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, while Cherry's headquarters sits at 2 Embarcadero Center in San Francisco's Financial District. The geography is telling. Building a healthcare fintech startup from the coasts while staying rooted in middle America is part of how Cherry keeps its feet on the ground - close to the providers and patients who actually use the product.
BNPL for the Doctor's Office
Buy Now, Pay Later has saturated retail. You can finance a pair of sneakers, a sofa, or a weekend flight. Healthcare was the last frontier - and the most consequential one. Cherry entered the space with a simple but powerful premise: patients should never have to choose between their health and their finances.
The mechanics are stripped down. A patient needs dental implants, a skin treatment, or vision correction. The practice runs them through Cherry's application - takes about 60 seconds, no hard credit inquiry. Cherry's underwriting engine evaluates the application and approves roughly 9 in 10 patients who apply. The patient picks a payment plan: Pay-in-4 at 0% interest, or longer-term plans with rates starting at 5.99% APR. The provider gets paid upfront within 2-3 business days. The patient pays Cherry over time.
Cherry by the Numbers
The provider wins on three dimensions simultaneously: more patients say yes to treatment, the average ticket gets larger because patients can afford the full recommended care rather than a compromised version of it, and cash flow becomes predictable because Cherry pays upfront regardless of when the patient finishes their plan.
That combination is why 60,000+ healthcare providers have chosen Cherry as their preferred financing partner - and why providers select it five times more often than legacy competitors like CareCredit, Sunbit, and PatientFi when making a side-by-side comparison.
Cost should never be the reason a patient walks away from care they need. Cherry built the infrastructure to make that possible - one 60-second application at a time.
The Cherry MissionA $450B Problem in Plain Sight
The elective and specialty healthcare market is enormous. Dental, medical aesthetics, plastic surgery, vision, hearing, and veterinary care represent hundreds of billions in annual spend - and traditionally, all of it was either paid out-of-pocket or left unfunded when patients couldn't afford lump-sum payments. Insurance covers very little of elective care. Financing, when available, was cumbersome, opaque, and rejected too many patients to be useful.
Legacy medical credit cards solved part of the problem. They gave practices a way to offer financing. But the approval rates were low enough to exclude the middle-credit patient who actually needs help, the terms often included deferred interest traps that turned "0% APR" into a retroactive surprise, and the merchant fees ate into margins that specialty practices can't afford to compress further.
Provider Preference - Cherry vs. Competitors
Cherry's product rearchitected the relationship. Soft credit pulls protect patient credit scores during application. Underwriting built for healthcare's actual credit profile means a much wider swath of patients qualify. And transparent, no-hidden-fee terms mean patients can commit to a plan without second-guessing the fine print three months later.
Everywhere a Patient Needs a Payment Plan
Cherry's platform was designed to travel. The same core financing engine powers radically different practice types - and Boudreaux's commercial work spans all of them.
Implants, orthodontics, cosmetic dentistry - the treatments patients delay for years become approachable with Cherry payment plans.
Medspas, injectors, and estheticians use Cherry to turn consultations into booked treatments without the financial friction.
High-ticket procedures become financially feasible for a broader patient base when paid over time at 0% APR.
LASIK, corrective lenses, hearing aids - Cherry opens up elective sensory care to patients who previously couldn't afford it upfront.
Pet care emergencies and elective procedures both benefit from Cherry's fast approval and flexible repayment terms.
From chiropractic to dermatology, any practice charging for out-of-pocket care benefits from Cherry's infrastructure.
The breadth is deliberate. Cherry built a horizontal financing layer for healthcare rather than a vertical-specific product. That gives Boudreaux and the team a much larger addressable market, and it means a provider who offers multiple service lines doesn't need multiple financing partners.
From Seed to Series B - and Still Accelerating
Cherry's $44 million Series B, closed in September 2022, was the kind of round that validates a thesis. Investors backing the round were betting on the underlying infrastructure play: Cherry is not just a financing product, it is the operating system for how specialty healthcare practices grow revenue and manage patient relationships.
The same year, Cross River Bank - one of the infrastructure-layer lenders that powers major fintech platforms - extended a $50 million credit facility to Cherry Technologies. That kind of institutional credit backing signals something important: Cherry's underwriting model is considered sophisticated and reliable enough to anchor a significant lending relationship with a bank that does due diligence hard.
Funding Timeline
A team of 650+ employees builds and operates the platform. That headcount, for a company solving a very specific payment infrastructure problem in healthcare, tells you the scope of what Cherry has built: sales teams reaching out to new provider networks, support teams keeping existing providers running, and engineering teams continuing to improve the core underwriting and integration infrastructure.
Building the Healthcare Fintech Stack
San Francisco Product, Chattanooga Hustle
There is something intentional about being headquartered in San Francisco's Financial District while doing the commercial work from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Cherry's home office at 2 Embarcadero Center is the kind of address that signals institutional credibility to investors, banking partners, and healthcare system executives. But Chattanooga - a mid-size Southern city that has reinvented itself as a tech and logistics hub - has its own energy.
The Tennessee mid-market is exactly the kind of geography where Cherry's value proposition lands with force. Dental practices in mid-size Southern cities, medspas serving suburban markets, veterinary clinics outside the major metros - these are the providers who have been underserved by legacy healthcare financing products built for the coastal high-concentration market. Chris Boudreaux is in the room with them.
Chattanooga is not a compromise. It is where the market is - the providers who need Cherry most, the patients for whom cost is the realest barrier to care, and the network density that makes regional expansion possible.
The fintech industry tends to build products in San Francisco and New York, then wonder why adoption in the mid-market is slow. Cherry's model - product and capital from the coasts, commercial execution from the heartland - is a structural advantage that Boudreaux exemplifies. He is not flying in to pitch; he is already there.
Access to Care Is a Financial Problem
The healthcare financing space is not glamorous. It sits at the unsexy intersection of credit underwriting, healthcare practice management software, and consumer behavior change. There are no viral product launches, no consumer brand moments, no app-store charts to climb. The wins are quieter: a patient who gets the dental implants they needed for three years. A medspa that doubled its case acceptance rate in the first quarter with Cherry. A veterinarian who stopped losing clients to the cost conversation.
But quiet wins at scale are still scale. Cherry's growth to 60,000 provider partners means that the platform is now embedded in the financial workflows of a significant portion of the specialty healthcare market. When a practice in Memphis or Nashville or Knoxville onboards Cherry, it changes how they have the financial conversation with every patient who walks through the door - indefinitely.
That is the compounding effect Boudreaux and Cherry are building toward. It is not a consumer fintech story with network effects measured in downloads. It is a B2B infrastructure story measured in how deeply Cherry integrates with practice management software, how many staff members learn to offer Cherry as a default option, and how many patients complete procedures they would otherwise have delayed or declined.
The SIC code associated with Cherry's work - 8021, dental offices and clinics - captures only one slice of the platform's reach. The NAICS code 52232 - activities related to credit intermediation - is closer to the truth. Cherry is in the credit business. Specifically, the credit business that makes healthcare possible for the patients who need flexible terms and the providers who need reliable cash flow.
Building the Metrics That Matter
Cherry is the trusted financing partner for over 60,000 healthcare practices across dental, aesthetics, veterinary, and more.
Cherry raised $44 million in a Series B round to accelerate national expansion and product development.
~90% patient approval rate - vastly outperforming legacy medical credit products that excluded the patients who needed help most.
Providers using Cherry report +30% case acceptance and +50% transaction size growth on average after implementation.