Ash Wellness
Industry
HealthTech
Technologies
Python and its frameworks (Flask, Quart), FastAPI, GCP, MySQL, Redis, Nginx, CI/CD, Kubernetes
Website
With Remedy, Ash has increased their revenue >40x, lowered their burn rate, secured seed, seed extension, and series A funding, and increased their test kit sending capacity by 360%.
About the Company
Ash Wellness is a health testing company enabling the integration of at-home health testing into existing care options. They partner with healthcare providers and digital health companies to make healthcare more accessible to patients.
Ash was first conceptualized at the Cornell Tech MBA program. When Ash launched in 2019, their focus was supporting the LGBTQ+ community through accessible sexual health testing. As Ash has grown, they’ve expanded to over 150 types of biomarker tests and continue to prioritize serving people at the margins.
Their services include a secure API platform, white-label test kits, HIPAA compliant lab integrations, online patient and client portals, and a healthcare provider network. Common tests they run on their platform include diabetes/weight management, sexual health, hormone/fertility, cancer screens, kidney health, and heart health.
Remedy invested in Ash as part of their bridge round in 2022.
The Problem
Remedy’s Head of Product and Strategy Iggy Moliver first met Ash’s founder David Stein at Cornell Tech in 2020. Iggy became an adviser to Ash and angel-invested in their pre-seed.
Built on this relationship, Ash formally partnered with Remedy in spring 2021 when Ash decided to pivot from a D2C model to a B2B strategy. The pivot required them to integrate their services with their national lab network. They asked Remedy to support in building a secure and scalable API that acted as a connector between their platform and the labs.
As Ash has grown over the last 3+ years, Remedy has integrated into more teams, including the core Platform, to take on new responsibilities and support seamless scaling.
The Solutions
In order to build out the API at the beginning of the partnership, Remedy created an autonomous (or cross-functional) product squad that parallelized Ash’s internal engineering workstreams. In less than three months, Remedy’s team released a Lab API system that securely passed patient data between labs and Ash’s internal platform.
As Ash grew their clientele, they also expanded their lab network to align with new client needs, such as legal compliance in new states.
To align with this expansion, the Remedy team developed new services, including offering an API Physician of Record (POR) to improve patient experience. Instead of sending life-changing test results directly to a patient, a Physician of Record adds sensitivity into the process by having a doctor first receive and communicate critical test results. This way, patients don’t read complex medical news alone without advice or context.
Another functionality that Remedy built to align the lab API with new client needs is a “Lab Routing” feature. This feature is a sequential decision funnel that assigns client orders to the most suitable available lab based on requirements such as price, speed, state location, test types, etc.
All of Remedy’s original Lab API team members have worked and grown with Ash over the 3+ year partnership, and they continue to work with Ash on responsibilities now extending far past API, including core architecture and technology leadership.
For example, this Remedy team now leads the infrastructure of auth services — the core of Ash’s technical security — including permission management, session key validation, and credential verification. The team also now focuses on building tools for users that automate and optimize processes, which reduces dependency on engineers for issue resolution.
In addition to this Lab API team, Remedy has stood up additional team members on two other Ash teams to focus on other key areas of Ash’s services: portals and platform.
Portals
To improve the user-experience of Ash’s growing services, Remedy designed portals for patients and clients to view their orders and results.
During the summer of 2014, Remedy worked with ClassPass’ team to support their transition from a single-subscription plan to a multi-tier model through end-to-end implementation and testing. Existing users were seamlessly transitioned to their corresponding plans within the new subscription model and were able to upgrade or downgrade their plans with no service interruption.
Remedy ultimately helped:
Launch a mobile app MVP within 3 months.
Document and test API use-cases using functional tests.
Build architecture and release multi-tier subscription model in 2 mos.
Fix ClassPass’ reservation system to prevent overbooking and improve scalability and performance.
Transition from monolithic to microservices architecture, improving the long-term stability of the system.
"I worked on this partnership as both an internal member of ClassPass and a technical leader on the Remedy side. Remedy supported a rapidly evolving set of products, helping ClassPass scale from seed to series B. A truly dynamic collaboration."
Oleg Krook
Remedy CEO & Co-Founder
While working with Remedy, ClassPass raised a $12M Series A in 2014 and a $40M Series B in early 2015. They raised a $30M B extension in late 2015, just after the engagement concluded.
The engineering team at ClassPass grew from 3 people to over 30, with Remedy helping onboard and transition core team members.
Remedy’s automation of ClassPass’ system allowed an increase from a few thousand user reservations being made through the app per month to 30,000 reservations per month.
Remedy decreased the internal cost of creating reservations through ClassPass’ app by automating their manual system, allowing them to improve their cash flow.
ClassPass scaled from a few US cities to serve users nationwide and in select international markets.
The Impact
