VivorCare

Founders: Hil Moss & Justin Grischkan
Founding: 2022
Mission: Helping survivors lead happier, healthier lives
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Pre-Seed & <$5M raised
Investors: Flare Capital, Koa Labs, Techstars, Oncology Ventures, & assorted Angels
Key Customers: Cancer survivors, health plans, health systems
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$25M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

VivorCare is the first virtual survivorship clinic with a mission to help survivors lead happier, healthier lives. If we’re going to talk about VivorCare, first we need to talk about its co-founder, Hil Moss.

Hil had her whole life planned out. She had enrolled in business school at Yale in the fall of 2018 to accelerate a successful career in business planning for cultural organizations. Six weeks into classes, life took a sharp left turn with a breast cancer diagnosis. Hil spent 15 months going through aggressive treatment including 24 rounds of infusions, a double mastectomy, and five additional surgeries at Dana Farber here in Boston. “What was that like?” I asked her. “It was wild,” she replied with a laugh. That’s putting it lightly. Undoubtedly a life altering experience that would knock anyone down. But that’s not Hil. She wasn’t gonna give up, wasn’t gonna stop, she was just going to work harder. She’s a survivor.

Hil ran a multi-channel initiative to make the young adult cancer process more transparent. She created content across Instagram and her own blog that addressed topics ranging from mastectomy to egg freezing to genetic mutations. She even nurtured an Instagram community of 3000+ young women affected by breast cancer and volunteered her time to mentor young women who had been recently diagnosed.

The experience taught her a ton about cancer treatment and our healthcare system in America. She uncovered that there is a system level gap for cancer survivors who, after exiting active treatment, sort of get thrown to the wolves. What Hil experienced firsthand and through getting to know other members of her cancer community is that we’ve got a beautiful, but complicated, new problem. Cancer survivorship is growing rapidly and the way that we distribute care has not quite kept up. Hil returned to Yale to get her MBA. Plus a Masters of Public in Health with a mission to help acquire the skills to solve this problem.

Cancer survivorship is very misunderstood. Even 5 or 10 years ago there just weren’t as many survivors. And survivorship has to do with much more than cancer. Cancer survivors utilize more healthcare than the general population. They often can’t find clinicians to manage their care. Cancer treatments create various cardiac toxicities, bone toxicities, pain, neuropathy and more. Second, 7/10 cancer patients enter treatment with comorbidities, like diabetes, that are exacerbated or neglected while going through cancer treatment. Third, there are mental health challenges like “fear of recurrence” that cause significant distress and can drive overutilization of healthcare.

In summary, it’s a complex & high risk population to manage, and there is now unprecedented pressure on oncologists (cancer doctors) as well as primary care physicians, who aren’t always trained to deal with this emerging patient population.

Hil founded VivorCare alongside Dr. Justin Grischkan, who was a clinician at University of Pennsylvania at the time, in 2022 to help fill the gap. After talking to 600 survivors, they built a more holistic care solution for cancer survivorship and within the last month VivorCare has started seeing patients. Their first virtual clinic is live in PA.

They are customizing their care plans at the individual patient level with the aim to act as a connective tissue within the larger healthcare system as survivorship means very different things to different people. VivorCare was a TechStars 2022 graduate, and they plan to leverage technology, including potential AI solutions, in the quarters ahead. 

Operators to Know (Founding Team):

• Justin Grischkan, Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer
• Hil Moss, Co-Founder & CEO
• Natasha Rabinowitz Steele MD, MPH, Clinical Content Peer Support
• Alicia Tan, Director of Operations

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the VivorCare team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

• More roles coming in the months ahead!

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

• What are the key milestones the VivorCare team is looking to achieve in the months ahead?
• What is the long term vision for the company? 
• What are some of the biggest obstacles to achieving that vision?
• What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about VivorCare you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team help more survivors. All of us applaud your efforts. See you in virtual halls and across the U.S. in the years ahead!