Cardiovascular care, reimagined - from a startup that decided to fix heart care from Albuquerque.
Cardiovascular disease is the most expensive category of illness in America, running to roughly $450 billion a year. That is the kind of number that makes people either look away or start a company. Ian Koons and Ben Selzer started a company.
Founded in 2021 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Karoo Health is a value-based specialty care enabler for cardiology. In plainer English: it helps cardiology practices, health systems and health plans stop getting paid per office visit and start getting paid for keeping heart patients healthy. That sounds like a slogan. Making it work is mostly logistics.
The logistics look like this. Karoo drops wraparound care teams - nurses, dietitians, pharmacists, health coaches and advanced-practice providers - into a cardiology practice's workflow, on-site and virtually. Between visits, those teams keep tabs on patients so that the small problems get handled before they become the 2am emergency-room kind.
Underneath sits Kohere.ai, Karoo's proprietary platform. It pulls data from remote monitors, electronic health records, insurance claims and health information exchanges, then uses that data to flag who is at risk and tell a human what to do next. The AI serves the nurse; it does not replace her.
These are company-reported and pilot-stage figures. Treat them as claims worth watching, not settled science - but they are the numbers the whole model turns on.
Caption: The whole bet in four boxes. If the conversion number holds at scale, the economics work. If it doesn't, it's a very good pilot.
Cardiovascular Care Reimagined.
Karoo's product is not one thing. It is a care team and a platform, sold together, wired to the same goal: fewer bad heart days.
Proprietary technology that aggregates data from remote monitors, EHRs, claims and health information exchanges, uses AI to flag patient risk, powers real-time communication, and hands providers and payers performance dashboards.
Advanced-practice providers, nurses, dietitians, pharmacists and health coaches embedded on-site with a practice and available virtually between visits - the human layer that makes the data actionable.
Shared-savings and risk arrangements with health plans and provider groups, typically opening with a 6-9 month fee-for-service trial before the flip to risk. Trust first, then the contract.
Around-the-clock virtual cardiology delivered through a joint venture with Heartbeat Health, extending coverage nationwide so a patient question at midnight has somewhere to go.
Karoo sells to organizations, but the payoff lands on patients. Depending on who you are, the "product" looks different.
Reported total raised had grown past the seed by 2025, with a Series A publicly discussed as the next step.
Karoo's partnership strategy has a theme: borrow reach, own the model.
Karoo Health is founded in Albuquerque by Ian Koons and Ben Selzer.
Receives initial seed funding from Panoramic Ventures and FirstMile Ventures to reimagine cardiovascular care.
Closes an oversubscribed $3.4M seed round and launches its digital cardiovascular care platform.
Publishes results validating its cardiac VBC model - high patient conversion, engagement, and ED-diversion cost savings.
Announces a joint venture with Heartbeat Health for national, scalable, end-to-end cardiac value-based care.
Announces an exclusive Medicare Advantage partnership with Zing Health; network reported at 500+ clinicians.
Interviews and demos live on the open web; the links below point to Karoo's own channels and to reporting and conversations about the company.
Caption: No official demo reel was verifiable at time of filing. When Karoo posts one, the interview and conversation links above are the closest thing to seeing the founders think out loud.