Chapter raises $100M Series E after hitting $100M ARR in 2.5 years — with only 30 people on staff

the packaging, it doesn't say brought to you by the cracked team at Mod Retro. It just says crack team.

I don't know.

So maybe this is some new slang.

They cracked it open. Well, uh, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Cody Bloomfield Gance from Chapter into the TV Ultra Down. Cody, how are you doing? doing well. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for hopping on. Uh, please introduce yourself and the company.

My name is Kobe. Uh, I run a company called Chapter. We are a Medicare navigation and retirement platform. I started the company a few years ago after seeing my parents struggle with the Medicare process. Pretty much every person in this country who's over 65 or retiring has to deal with Medicare. Um, and I was just uh really appalled at how bad their experience was and wanted to make it much better. That's what we've been up to.

Yeah. early on uh when you kind of discovered the problem, did you assume that that there was companies already solving it? Well, and that you know when you when you talk about the scale of the market, it's like everyone over we're an aging country and everyone in in retirement uh for the most part is dealing with this.

Um what did you what did you find and then what gave you the confidence to to um start the company? Uh I found really poor uh experiences all around. Uh most Medicare brokerages in this country are um heavily incentivized to push plans that pay people uh that pay brokers more rather than focusing on what's best for the consumer. Um and there's really no good technology in the space at all. Um so you really have a combination of sort of mom and pop brokers. You can think of these as local real estate agents and then you have these legacy call centers that are basically just like marketing orgs that are very bad at what they do. um and really nothing in between that really prioritizes the consumer's interest. Um so, uh when my parents were going through it, they had to deal with faxes and phone calls and they got really bad guidance. My mom actually now has uh lifetime late enrollment penalties because she was told to sign up too late. Yes, the government imposes lifetime penalties on people if they sign up late for Medicare.

Good. Uh yeah, talk to me about uh then how it seems like reaching the potential customer or user as early as possible is critical. What's the customer journey to actually uh get on chapter or work with an advisor? Uh how do the users actually find the product?

We take an really heavy AIdriven approach, but we augment humans with the AI. So, we have one of the smallest teams um probably of any tech company and especially any Medicare company for our scale and we're really proud of that because we're pretty sophisticated users of AI.

Um and so a consumer will find us through one of our partners. We do almost no direct to consumer work. It's all through enterprise partners. Yeah.

Um they'll find out about us through their financial adviser or their health system or hospital.

Um they will give us a call, fill out some information, and they'll be connected to one of our full-time employees who's a licensed Medicare adviser. that Medicare adviser has a lot of tooling at their at their fingertips that we've built to make sure they can deliver really high quality guidance all the time for every single person.

And and what does that tooling look like? Is it is it visualizing and analyzing numbers and sort of instantiating spreadsheets and dashboards and charts or is it actually going and filling out forms and dealing with like legacy government systems that can be abstracted into something that's just more usable?

All of the above and a lot more though. I'll give you a couple of examples. Um, one is, uh, every single insurance carrier has a different portal that one has to use to look up information and fill out forms. So, we have to automate all of that and they don't, most of them don't have APIs as you can imagine. Yeah.

Um, so that's kind of the automation of uh, filling out forms and paperwork.

Um, the for any given uh, Medicare plan recommendation, we have to know every doctor that that person is in network with. We have to know every prescription that that person takes. In order to answer the what sounds like a very simple question of what prescription will will what will a prescription cost on a given Medicare plan at a given pharmacy

that requires tens of billions of records to know just that one question and that's one of many elements. So we do a lot of work to obviously our Medicare advisors are not crunching those numbers every time they talk to someone. So a lot of that to surface the right answer to the to the Medicare adviser.

Yeah. Uh you guys just surpassed 100 million uh uh run rate. Uh what seems pretty fast for uh for company in in healthcare uh which typically you know this isn't like selling like some some image image gen model or something like that. Uh what is what is bestin-class? Who are you guys going up against from a kind of zero to hund00 million run rate? Uh I'm assuming you guys are one of the the faster uh in history, but uh I'm curious.

I I don't think of ourselves as a healthcare company really. I think of ourselves as a really good tech company. So we compare ourselves to the fastest growing companies. We grow as fast or faster than companies like RAMP, companies like Glean. Um we went one to 100 mil in run rate revenue and I think about two and a half years. Um so I really think about us as just like what do great tech companies do and we try to orient the team around that because the bar is just too low in healthcare. So then what is the uh what is the funnel to to actually grow the business? What is the what is the flow? You said you don't do consumer marketing. Um is this like you said enterprises? Are you uh do you have SDRs? Are you going outbound to companies and and financial advisory groups? Um what is that uh go to market motion actually look like?

We do have an enterprise partnerships enterprise growth team. Yeah. Um

the team the whole team is about six or seven people. Uh so as I said we're very small and we take a lot of pride in having a really high bar for talent.

The whole the entire company is

no no team enter team is

but but all of all of our sort of corporate headcount product engineering growth uh legal etc. We're about 30 people.

Wow.

That's still that's remarkable. Well congratulations. Uh you just raised a round. Tell us about it.

Yeah uh we raised about $100 million uh led by Al Gore's generation fund. Thanks Massive.

Absolutely massive.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the progress and thank you for