Healthcare FinTech Nitra Raises $62M, Launches Visa Business Card

Healthcare FinTech company Nitra has raised $62 million in a seed round and is launching its first product — a Visa Business card for physicians.

The company will use the funds to bring modern financial products, integrated medical software and supply chain solutions to practitioners and physicians in the healthcare industry, according to a Tuesday (Aug. 23) press release.

“Our goal is to partner with practitioners to provide an ecosystem that combines innovative [FinTech] and cutting-edge software solutions to help doctors better manage their practices and better focus on their patients,” Nitra Founder and CEO Jonathan Chen said in the release.

With the first product being launched by Nitra, physicians can use the Visa Business card to earn rewards on common expenditures and can use software for spend management, business analytics and reconciliation, per the release.

Beyond that, Nitra plans to offer doctors, practices and hospitals more financial service products and software tools.

The company has also partnered with many healthcare industry suppliers and vendors, saying this will enable it to deliver seamless transactions on its platform, the press release said.

PYMNTS research has found that while the healthcare industry’s suppliers prefer automated clearing house (ACH) and direct deposit payments, their customers still make up to 85% of their payments by check or other paper-based methods.

Read more: Healthcare Represents 20% of GDP That Desperately Needs Payments Efficiency

As reported in the “B2B Payments in Healthcare Tracker,” a PYMNTS and American Express collaboration, this is in part because “healthcare is different,” with a large share of the industry’s purchasing going through purchasing middlemen that add an extra layer of complexity to the digitization equation.

While automation and digitization have taken hold in some aspects of healthcare, there are still substantial friction points, the report found.