SWORD Health Series-B

This is the SWORD Health pitch deck to raise a $25m series-b round in 2021.

About

SWORD Health is a digital musculoskeletal (MSK) therapy provider. The company pairs licensed physical therapists with innovative technology to help people overcome their chronic and post-surgical pain faster and more cost-effectively. We’re on a mission to free two billion people from pain by making it simple for people to recover at home, without resorting to imaging, surgeries, or opioids.

Since launching in 2015, SWORD Health has worked with insurers, health systems, and employers in Europe, Australia, and the U.S. to give thousands of people access to preventative, chronic, and post-surgical MSK care that gets results.

SWORD Health has offices in New York City, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Sydney, and Porto

On Christmas Day, Virgilio Bento had a lot to celebrate.

His company, SWORD Health, had officially closed its latest funding round on the holiday to the tune of $25 million. It was the maximum amount he wanted to raise for the company’s Series B that came less than a year after its public launch in the US. Transformation Capital led the round, which also included existing investors Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund.

SWORD Health is just one of several startups hoping to reimagine physical therapy for a virtual world. It uses motion-tracking technology paired with treatment plans from credentialed doctors or physical therapists to provide remote-first relief for patients experiencing musculoskeletal conditions such as neck or shoulder pain.

The startup launched in the US in January 2020 after deploying its services in Europe and Australia, Bento told Insider. The timing, just prior to nationwide lockdowns in the US meant to contain the spread of the coronavirus, was both a benefit and a challenge, Bento said.

At first, the company grew rapidly as more patients were shut out of traditional physical therapy clinics. Shortly after, companies began reviewing the benefits they offered in the name of cost-cutting and SWORD, which makes profits based on large contracts with employers, suffered.

“COVID was a tailwind because it reinforced the need for patients to receive care at home, but it also had headwinds,” Bento said. “The self-insured employers stopped their search for new solutions, so there was a deceleration in the second quarter.”

Once the dust had settled, however, SWORD rebounded and then some, Bento said. The resulting growth, which Bento said includes the company’s 75% success rate in signing deals with companies they’ve pitched, was what caught investors’ eyes when he started thinking about ways to sustain the growth beyond the coronavirus pandemic.

“We saw this big growth in the third and fourth quarters, and we understood that the operational needs would require additional funding to deliver in the first and second quarters this year,” Bento said. “We knew we should raise again by the end of the year, and we took that decision forward in a very fast process.”

Bento is based on Portugal and met with investors entirely remotely in what he called an “incredibly efficient” fundraising process. Although he said he missed the face-to-face time with his new lead investor, Transformation Capital, he predicted that he would replicate the earlier stages of the process even in a post-COVID-19 world.

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