PayGround Raises $19.7 Million to Grow Healthcare Payments Platform

PayGround raised $19.7 million in a Series A funding round to support the growth of its healthcare payments platform.

The company will use the capital to expand into hospitals and health systems, building on its success in the ambulatory market, and add to its senior leadership team, PayGround said in a Tuesday (Nov. 28) press release.

“Most Americans have encountered the fragmented experience of paying healthcare bills,” PayGround Co-founder and CEO Drew Mercer said in the release. “PayGround empowers individuals and families with a dedicated digital wallet in which they can manage and pay all their healthcare provider bills in one place.”

The company’s platform provides patients with a mobile app to manage, track and pay all medical bills securely and in one place, according to the release.

It also offers medical providers a modern payment platform that reduces costs, simplifies processes and boosts customer satisfaction, the release said.

By simplifying how individuals and families pay for healthcare, PayGround boosts customer satisfaction among patients and strengthens revenue cycle outcomes for healthcare providers, per the release.

PayGround’s latest funding round was led by SixThirty, according to the release.

“Payments, and particularly out-of-pocket payments, continue to be a vexing pain point for healthcare providers and patients,” Andrew Wegrzyn, principal at SixThirty, said in the release. “With this current round of funding, PayGround will continue to grow as a recognized and trusted partner for providers and patients — modernizing the way healthcare payments are made in the U.S.”

PYMNTS Intelligence found that 79% of surveyed consumers would prefer to be able to pay all types of medical bills via a single digital healthcare platform.

In addition, at a time when consumers are searching for all the credit or other financing help they can get, 72% of surveyed consumers would prefer to access financing options as part of a single digital platform, according to “The Digital Platform Promise: How Patients Want to Streamline Healthcare Payments,” a PYMNTS and Lynx collaboration.

The availability of payments platforms and buyer/supplier choice helps improve collections on services rendered in an industry where providers typically write off 30% of bad debt, Mercer told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted in April 2022.

“If you can meet that optionality with modernized convenience, then that can take a huge bite out of that 30%,” Mercer said at the time.