In late February I received a Series A term sheet from Healthier Capital while standing in line at a Walgreens.
A few hours earlier, my wife had gone to the urgent care next door. They’d sent her prescription, but the pharmacy told her to come back later. After calls to the pharmacy, she asked me to pick up on my way home. I waited in line, and soon learned the delay was because they didn’t take her insurance. The medication was eight dollars with a coupon. The hour was gone, my wife was sick at home. The problem I have spent four years of my life trying to solve felt as difficult as ever – even with a term sheet in my inbox. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
Today we’re announcing a $16M Series A led by Healthier, with backing from Notation, Flare, and Evidenced, to expand the prescription marketplace we’ve built at Photon. The press release is out, but this won’t be that type of Series A announcement, because this funding isn’t our story yet. What our team did to get here is our story.
After our last fundraise, we set out to prove three things that felt impossible: expand into enterprise, make the marketplace model work, and demonstrate positive unit economics. Most companies pick one hard thing – we had to pull off all three, or there wasn’t going to be a Photon. Despite a lot of missteps, we nailed all three.
None of that work is visible in a funding announcement. The invisible part is what I want to write about, and it lives in one of our values that is most special to me: growth in darkness.
For me, this is the kind of growth that actually changes you – the kind that happens when no one is watching. The hard part isn’t making the call or having the conversation, but what comes before – recognizing what’s actually holding you back, naming the underlying problem instead of the symptom, and being willing to look at the truth even when it implicates yourself. Understanding my emotions, listening more, and owning my mistakes have made me better; I'm a different leader than I was eighteen months ago, and the work of getting there has meant more to me than the result.
In June 2025 we did a layoff. It was a gut-wrenching call, and one of the hardest days of my career. Later that week, we held a funeral for a version of Photon we’d been before. We filled a small toy coffin with mementos of the old company, carried it across Williamsburg, and threw it in the East River. It sounds absurd written down, and it was, but it was also the moment we really committed to our marketplace vision and to enterprise. It was also the moment I let go of the nostalgic version of Photon I had been holding on to.
After that, our team locked the fuck in. Every deal, hire, and partnership we’ve closed since came as a downstream consequence of that commitment. We took a bet on our long-term vision, and the universe has started rewarding it.
This team deserves the credit for today’s moment in the sun. What we’ve done together in these nine months is the work I’m most proud of – fumbling in the dark, figuring it out together. My COO Sophie and our CTO Davina have leveled up this leadership team and helped me grow as a leader; I’m grateful every day for our partnership. Many incredible people who helped us get this far are no longer at Photon, but their fingerprints are on everything we ship. They own a part of this success too.
Over the years, a few people took a bet on us well before it made economic sense. Nick at Notation was the first person who ever told me I could be a CEO; he doubled down on Photon when the business didn’t quite make sense yet, and he’s on our board.
I met Amir and Gregor at Healthier on a video call in early February. Gregor stayed on long after the call should have ended, thinking several chess moves ahead with me, and he’s now on our board too. Amir intuitively understands healthcare in a way I’ve never seen, and he’s quite funny – a trait in common with the leaders I admire most.
When I set out to raise this round, I told myself I would rather raise nothing than bring people into our orbit whom I didn’t deeply admire. That was a luxury afforded by a low burn rate and a team that had earned the right to be picky. I’m humbled by the chance to work with such smart people.
The same is true of the customers and partners who made this round possible long before it closed – early customers who helped us iterate when the product was much rougher, health system leaders who believed we could pull off an Epic integration, and partners who’ve scaled unconventional deals with us. They all took the risks that made this real.
The work ahead is going to be at least as hard as the work behind us. The last chapter felt impossible, and we did it. This one – supporting major health systems and realizing consumer transparency in pharmacy benefits – feels equally impossible right now. That’s how I know it’s the right work.
Healthcare technology is changing faster than ever, and our job is to make sure that innovation reaches patients in ways that save them money and help them live healthier lives. Just as cars are starting to drive themselves, prescription decisions will increasingly be managed by AI at scale. We’re here to make sure humans on the other end of that stack – the patients – stay at the center of it. That’s our work.
For now, I’m headed back into the darkness, like a rat into the sewers of this crazy beautiful city.