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Smiling in a Las Vegas convention center with a Tom Cruise lookalike. Snapshot of a weekend coastal drive with an engineering candidate in a convertible along the California coast. Panorama of a founding team huddled over the shoulder of a medical practice’s Office Manager as she shows how the complexities of health insurance companies drain hours from each day she’d otherwise be spending on patient interaction. Two European cofounders in North Carolina participating in a working group discussion with a dozen of their customers. These are just some of the pictures in the text thread that Lassie’s CEO Steijn Pelle has maintained with us over the years since we met. Interspersed with screen captures of ‘up and to the right’ graphs, they make up an archive of our relationship, and this company, in a way that makes us nostalgic for what has been accomplished and excited for what’s ahead.
Steijn and his cofounder Frédéric Renken started out with the hypothesis that if technology could solve every non-patient care aspect of running a medical practice the benefits would be significant. Not just in terms of financial outcomes but the increased amount of time doctors and their teams could spend on doing what they actually love: working with patients and one another. But you can’t swallow the entirety of that mission on Day One, so they started with financial workings of dental offices, specifically an agent that would handle insurance payment posting, a sneaky large business by itself!
They also knew if you were going to build an “AI to Run Doctor’s Offices”, you needed to get it right, otherwise you’d lose trust. So they started with the hardest customer of them all - sole/small proprietorships. Not selling top down into PE rollups or enterprise health systems, but winning the proverbial hearts, minds and wallets of dentists and their office staff, knowing that only once they got to one customer, then 10, then 100 (the cofounders hand onboarded all of the first hundred offices), could they press on the accelerator.
And so today Lassie is announcing (i) themselves, (ii) their progress to date (700+ practices across 49 states) and (iii) the fuel for that acceleration, a $35 million Series A led by a16z.
It’s been awesome to see these founders and small team build something that’s valuable to customers, powered by the frontier edges of technology. Steijn will emphasize how important it is to them that Lassie is a group win - the founders, their team, their customers, their investors. Your local doctor deserves software that fights for them and lets patients see the benefits too. Lassie will be the company which succeeds here, starting first with your dentist and then beyond.
If you happen to run a business that could benefit from Lassie (or know someone who would), let them know. And if working at an early inflection point for a company like Lassie interests you, they’re hiring.