Company Profile · Fintech
The Bank Two Doctors Built After Their Own Bank Said No
Two physicians drowning in student debt kept getting rejected by traditional banks. So they recruited a Wall Street analyst and built the lender they wished existed - one that treats a doctor's diploma as an asset, not a liability.
When Ned Palmer and Michael Jerkins finished medical residency, they had two things in abundance: patients who trusted them with their lives, and banks that did not. Between them the two doctors carried more than $700,000 in student debt. When they walked into traditional lenders looking for help - a loan, a mortgage, a break - they were met with high interest rates, cosigner demands, restrictive terms, and, often enough, a flat no.
The irony was hard to miss. A resident is, statistically, one of the most reliable future earners in the entire economy. Yet the banking system looked at the debt on the front of the ledger and ignored the diploma on the back of it. Palmer and Jerkins spent years trying to fix this for themselves and their colleagues. They failed, repeatedly. What they were missing was not a product idea. It was a person who understood exactly why the banks were getting the math wrong.
That person was Tyler Stafford, a bank equity research analyst - and, as it happened, Jerkins's college roommate and friend since the ninth grade. Stafford had spent a decade studying how banks assess risk. He immediately saw the mispricing: lenders were treating early-career doctors as if their present balance sheet was their whole story. He joined as CEO. On November 1, 2020, the three launched Panacea Financial, a digital bank designed around one customer and one customer only - the doctor.
A bank that reads the diploma, not just the balance
Panacea Financial is a full-stack digital bank built for physicians, dentists and veterinarians. It is not a lightly branded app sitting on top of someone else's checking account. It operates as a division of Primis Bank (NASDAQ: FRST), a publicly traded, state-chartered, FDIC-insured institution. That structure matters: instead of spending years chasing its own bank charter, Panacea partnered with a real regulated bank and shipped regulated products from day one. Deposits are FDIC insured. The lending is genuine bank lending.
The product line follows a doctor across an entire career rather than a single transaction. It starts with the PRN Personal Loan - up to $75,000, fixed rate, no cosigner, no prepayment penalty, application in under 10 minutes - aimed at the expensive gaps of training: board exam fees, residency interview travel, relocation, or consolidating credit-card debt. From there it widens into student-loan refinancing (with no maximum balance and rates that do not swing with your income), doctor mortgages, and a Practice Solutions arm that finances the leap from employee to owner: buy-ins, acquisitions, real estate, equipment, and expansion.
One customer, forty years
The genius of the model is also its constraint: Panacea's customer never changes, but their needs do. A first-year medical student, a fourth-year resident, a newly minted attending, and a dentist buying into a practice are the same person at different points on a very predictable income curve. Generalist banks see four unrelated risk profiles. Panacea sees one long relationship. That is why the company can offer a resident a loan without a cosigner - it is underwriting the arc, not the snapshot.
The customer base spans both sides of the ledger. On the consumer side: students, residents, fellows and attending physicians. On the business side: private practices, plus the dental and medical service organizations (DSOs and MSOs) that need deposit and treasury services. The company markets through medical and specialty societies - groups such as the American College of Emergency Physicians and several state medical societies - reaching doctors where they already gather.
- $300K in student debt
- Low current income
- Thin credit file
- → Needs a cosigner. High rate. Or declined.
- A future high earner
- A 40-year income curve
- A specialty and a career stage
- → Fixed rate. No cosigner. Approved.
How Panacea makes money - and how it raised it
The business model is what fintech has taken to calling vertical banking: pick a narrow, high-value, underserved profession and go deep. Panacea earns net interest income on its loans and deposit relationships, the same way any bank does. The difference is customer selection. By owning the doctor relationship early and keeping it for decades, it can cross-serve personal loans, refinancing, mortgages and practice financing to the same person over time, rather than winning a single transaction and moving on.
Investors have bought the thesis. In January 2024, Panacea raised a $24.5M Series B. In July 2025, New York's Valar Ventures - the round's sole institutional investor - extended it with an additional $37M, bringing total equity to $62M. The stated plan for the money is to sharpen the digital platform and build intelligent tools that use Panacea's proprietary data to personalize financial decisions for doctors and their practices.
There is a quieter advantage in that data. Every loan Panacea underwrites teaches it more about how a specific specialty earns, spends and repays - how an emergency physician's income curve differs from an orthodontist's, or a rural veterinarian's. A generalist bank never accumulates that resolution because its book is spread across a thousand professions. Panacea's book is spread across one, which turns every year of operating history into sharper underwriting. The narrowness that looks like a limitation is, in practice, the flywheel.
Funding to date · cumulative equity
Series B, extended · sole institutional investor: Valar Ventures
Where it sits in the market
The expertiseWhy three people were the right three
Most fintechs are built by technologists who study a market from the outside. Panacea inverted that. Two of its founders are practicing doctors who lived the exact problem - the rejection letters, the cosigner demands, the sense of being a second-class customer despite years of training. The third, Tyler Stafford, spent a decade as a bank equity research analyst dissecting how lenders price risk. That combination is unusual: it pairs first-hand knowledge of the customer's pain with technical fluency in the machinery that caused it. Jerkins practices in Little Rock and hosts a podcast for doctors; Palmer is a hospitalist and Harvard Medical School faculty member in Boston. The company did not hire empathy for its market. It was founded on it.
Panacea is not the only firm that noticed doctors were mispriced. Student-loan refinancers like SoFi and Laurel Road court physicians; practice lenders such as Live Oak Bank and Bank of America's Practice Solutions chase the business side; a handful of newer entrants like BankMD pursue the same vertical-bank idea. What separates Panacea is coverage. Most competitors own one slice - the refinance, or the mortgage, or the practice loan. Panacea tries to be the single account that follows a doctor from their first residency paycheck to the day they sell their practice. Founder credibility helps too: it is hard to out-empathize a bank where two of the three founders still treat patients.
The lesson worth stealing
Panacea's playbook is unusually copyable. Step one: find a profession that generalist banks underwrite badly because they read a temporary balance sheet instead of a lifetime income curve. Step two: partner with a chartered bank instead of spending years and millions chasing your own license. Step three: build the full product stack for that one customer so you own the relationship for decades, not minutes. The founders did not invent a new financial instrument. They noticed a group being priced wrong and refused to accept the rejection they had personally received.
Where would it not work? The model needs a customer whose future earnings are both high and highly predictable - which is exactly why doctors fit and why many professions do not. It also leans on a healthy partner bank and a lending environment where fixed-rate products pencil out. Concentrate your entire book on one profession and you inherit that profession's risks. But for the specific, credit-worthy, chronically underserved population it chose, Panacea built something that a resident staring at a rejection letter would recognize instantly: a bank that finally says yes.
Milestones