FinTech startup PayZen said it has raised more than $5 million in seed financing. In a press release, PayZen said the company “was incubated with Viola Ventures in 2019, with more recent investments coming from Picus Capital, TWO39 Ventures and others.”
The company bills itself as a patient-financing startup that “pays hospitals upfront for patient invoices and offers patients zero-interest, fee-free payment plans.” The release said that PayZen’s “platform is expected to increase collections for hospitals by 50 percent, while making healthcare more affordable for patients.”
PayZen said the company had “just inked deals with RMS, a revenue cycle management vendor, and Vim, a digital health company,” to provide interest-free payment plans via hundreds of U.S. hospital systems. According to the release, “the partnerships have allowed PayZen to successfully deploy (its) artificial intelligence (AI)-backed technology platform across a number of healthcare providers, reaching hundreds of hospital systems and thousands of patients across the country.”
“PayZen addresses a decades-long problem of hospital bills going unpaid due to patients’ inability to pay large lump-sum medical invoices,” said PayZen’s CEO and Co-founder Itzik Cohen. He said that PayZen is seeing strong demand as it enrolls patients who haven’t been able to pay their medical bills.
The offering comes as the healthcare industry struggles with the pandemic. As noted in PYMNTS’ January 2021 Healthcare Payment Experience Report, done in collaboration with Rectangle Health, “physicians and health systems lost billions in revenue during the first few months of 2020.” The report showed that 45 percent of patients would “choose to stay home and disengage with their healthcare providers, even if doing so was not legally required or was medically inadvisable.” That’s what many millions did in 2020, putting off checkups, screenings and elective surgeries. The report found that nearly two-thirds of patients want access to payment plans, while only 44 percent of patients report being offered such a plan in 2020.
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