Last week, healthtech startup Doximity made a successful public debut on the New York Stock Exchange, making co-founder and CEO Jeff Tangney’s stake in the company worth $2.9 billion. Tangney’s 11-year journey to take the company public began with the lessons he’d learned from his previous healthtech startup, as well as the will to go against conventional Silicon Valley wisdom.
Dubbed the “LinkedIn for doctors,” Doximity has been quietly growing ever since it was founded by Tangney, Shari Buck, and Nate Gross in 2011. The platform lets medical professionals network while also communicating with patients and colleagues. The service has become so mainstream, in fact, that 80% of physicians use it. Most of the company’s revenue comes from drugmakers that promote their products to doctors.
The last fiscal year proved to be a good one for Doximity — the company’s annual revenue grew 77% to $206.9 million, and after it raised $500 million in its IPO, Doximity’s market capitalization is currently $9.4 billion.
“I did resist some of the Silicon Valley wisdom of, you need to go big, you need to hire 40 more salespeople and do all these things,” Tangney told CNBC after ringing the opening bell.
Doximity isn’t the first healthtech venture for Tangney, who founded Epocrates in 1998, a platform designed for cell phones like BlackBerries and Palm Pilots to let doctors track patients’ health on the go. After raising $40 million in venture capital, investors advised Tangney and co-founder Richard Fiedotin to accelerate hiring. Then came the dotcom bubble, and seven years later, the 2008 financial crisis.
Running Epocrates felt more and more like a chore for Tangney, whose co-founder had left him to run the company practically on his own. He ended up selling it for $293 million to healthtech company Athenahealth in 2009.
When he co-founded Doximity, two years after leaving Epocrates, Tangney sought to avoid the startup pitfalls he’d encountered before. This time around, Tangney made sure Doximity was profitable. The last time the company raised venture capital was in 2014, when it got $50 million, but the money still hasn’t been spent yet.
That might be why the company’s market cap came as such a shock to Wall Street — 2014 was the last time the company disclosed a valuation, just under $400 million. Now that Doximity is public, however, investors will be keeping a close eye on the newly-minted unicorn.
