Float Health

01 - Who They Are NowThe Staffing Layer Hiding Inside Specialty Pharmacy

Float Health is the kind of company that, if it works, you will never hear its name as a patient. You will simply notice that the nurse who came to your living room knew what she was doing, that she had the right meds in her bag, and that the bill was a fraction of what the hospital wanted to charge. Float is the connective tissue: a marketplace of credentialed registered nurses on one side, the big specialty pharmacies on the other, and a software platform in the middle telling everyone where to be at 9 a.m.

By the end of the first quarter of 2025 the company had completed more than 45,000 home visits, with about 3,000 more being added every month. It works with CVS Health, Optum, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Kroger, Option Care Health and Soleo Health - the names that show up on most American medicine cabinets, even when patients do not realize it. Float is the staffing layer underneath. The pharmacies still get the credit. The patients still get the meds. The hospital just gets skipped.

Float does not sell drugs. It sells a guaranteed pair of hands at a guaranteed doorstep at a guaranteed time. That, it turns out, is the part everyone was missing. - Editor's note

02 - The Problem They SawThe Inconvenient Math of Specialty Medication

Specialty drugs - biologics for Crohn's, MS, lupus, immune disorders - account for roughly 2% of prescriptions but 53% of pharmaceutical spending. They are the priciest, fussiest, most logistically annoying medications in the entire industry. Many require infusion. Many require a nurse. And historically, that has meant the patient driving to a hospital outpatient department, where the same drug administered at home costs eight to twelve times less.

It is the kind of inefficiency that looks, at a distance, like it should have been solved decades ago. It was not. Hospitals were not built to dispatch nurses. Pharmacies were not built to scout local clinicians. The home health agencies that did exist were largely regional, paper-based, and not exactly hungry for chronic-care complexity. So the patient kept driving. The bill kept growing. Everyone kept agreeing it was a problem and nobody fixed it.

Home care costs 8 to 12 times less than the hospital. That is not a margin. That is a chasm. - Float Health, company materials

03 - The Founders' BetAn ER Nurse, a COO, and a Hunch About Front Doors

Ryan Johnson was an emergency room nurse for the better part of two decades before he was a CEO. He learned the trade in the place where American healthcare's failures arrive last and loudest. His co-founder and wife, Christy Johnson, had spent years watching family members navigate chronic conditions. When Ryan ended up giving his own father a home infusion, the lightbulb was less a lightbulb and more a long, slow recognition. The hardest part was not the medicine. It was the logistics.

The pair started Float in 2021 with a thesis that read less like a startup pitch and more like a shrug: if nurses could be matched to homes the way drivers are matched to riders, with credentialing and clinical context layered on top, the whole infusion economy could be rerouted. They went through Y Combinator. They built the software. They started in California. Then Arizona. Then, in March 2024, they raised a $10 million Series A led by Canvas Ventures, with Mike Ghaffary joining the board and a guest list of angels that included Instacart co-founder Max Mullen and Yelp COO Jed Nachman.

We are not trying to replace the hospital. We are trying to replace the drive to the hospital. - Paraphrase, Ryan Johnson, CEO

04 - The ProductThree Apps, One Bet

The platform has three faces. A pharmacy portal that ingests referrals, runs the AI scheduling and spits out the documentation pharmacies need for reimbursement. A nurse mobile app that handles shift claiming, navigation, charting and payment. And the underlying matching engine that takes a referral - a patient, a drug, a window, a zip code - and finds the right local nurse in minutes, not days.

In March 2025 the company shipped a wave of AI-driven updates that, among other things, auto-generate patient charts, surface performance metrics back to specialty pharmacies, and consolidate the structured and unstructured patient context a nurse needs before knocking on a door. It is the unglamorous middleware that most of healthcare has been begging for and most of healthcare has refused to build.

What you can actually do with it

If you are a specialty pharmacy, you stop spending your nights cold-calling per-diem nurses. If you are a nurse, you turn nights and weekends into income without going through a hospital staffing agency. If you are a patient, you stay home. That is the entire pitch. Everything else is plumbing.

05 - The ProofThe Numbers That Make Pharmacies Pick Up the Phone

The most persuasive argument Float makes is the one written in dollars. The chart below is the back-of-envelope math that has been making CFOs at specialty pharmacies suddenly interested in home visits. The unit costs are approximate industry figures, not Float's own pricing - but the relative shape is what matters.

The clinical case is just as clean. Float reports a 97% shift fill rate - meaning when a specialty pharmacy sends a request, a credentialed nurse actually shows up almost every time. In a staffing industry where last-minute cancellations are the norm and a no-show can mean a missed dose, that number is the moat.

97% fill rate. In nurse staffing, that is suspiciously close to magic. - Industry observation

06 - The MissionMove the Hospital, Not the Patient

The official mission statement is the one you would expect: hospital-quality care, delivered at home, made accessible. The unofficial one is more interesting. Float is betting that the geographic assumption underneath American healthcare - patient comes to building - is just an artifact of the last century. The buildings are expensive. The drives are long. The infections are bad. The nurses, increasingly, would rather drive to ten houses than spend twelve hours under fluorescent lights.

The team itself reflects that bet. Ryan and Christy lead, but the leadership bench includes Daniel Pupius as CTO, Nels Gilbreth (an Eventbrite alum) on growth, and Rachel Schneiders, who came out of One Medical, running operations. Several team leads are former bedside nurses. That cultural composition - half clinic, half consumer tech - is, in a category that has historically been one or the other, unusually well-suited to the problem.

07 - Why It Matters TomorrowThe 25-State Plan and the Nurse Shortage Nobody Has Solved

Florida is projected to be short roughly 60,000 nurses by 2035. The U.S. broadly is short a lot more. Specialty drug spending is going up, not down. Chronic conditions are getting more common, not less. Hospitals are short on staff, short on beds, and short on patience. Float is publicly aiming to be in 25 states, reaching 80% of the population with chronic conditions, in the next few years. The competition - traditional home infusion providers, hospital-aligned home health, and a handful of newer nurse staffing platforms - is real. None of them have yet built the same kind of two-sided marketplace with the same kind of pharmacy distribution.

If Float gets to that number, the hospital infusion suite, as a piece of physical infrastructure, becomes optional. Not gone. Optional. And in healthcare, optional is the most disruptive word there is.

Optional is the most disruptive word there is. - The closing argument

It is 9:48 on the same Tuesday. The Phoenix infusion is done. The nurse logs the visit on her phone, packs up, and drives twenty minutes to her next patient. The 67-year-old patient closes the door, makes coffee, and goes back to his book. He did not see a waiting room. He did not pay a parking fee. He did not sit next to anyone with the flu. He took his specialty biologic, the way it was always supposed to be taken - in the place he already lives. That is the whole pitch. Float Health just happens to be the company that makes the appointment.