Florian Otto, Cedar, on Revolutionizing the Consumer Financial Experience in Healthcare

Digital Health Forward

In this episode, we meet Florian Otto, Co-Founder and CEO of Cedar. Cedar is a healthcare financial technology platform that enables a better and more transparent financial experience for consumers.

Cedar has raised approximately $350M in total funding to-date, recently closing a $200M Series D financing round led by Tiger Global Management, bringing the company’s total valuation to $3.2B. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Thrive Capital and Concord Health Partners also participated in the round. In May 2021, Cedar announced it had acquired OODA Health, a healthcare technology company focused on improving the healthcare administrative experience with payers and providers, for $425 million.

Prior to Cedar, Florian founded a daily deal company in Brazil (ClubeUrbano) that was eventually acquired by Groupon where he became Chief Executive Officer of Groupon Brazil, and was also an executive at Zocdoc where he drove the commercial adoption of the platform. Florian began his business career as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company within their healthcare practice. Florian holds a MD, DDS and PhD from the University of Freiburg, Germany.

In this episode, Florian and I chat about:

• Florian’s career journey: from medicine/academia to tech entrepreneurship to leading in healthcare
• Why the consumer financial experience in healthcare is historically complex and inefficient
• Evolution of Cedar’s platform over time — starting with a focus on post-visit billing and expanding to a comprehensive interface between consumers and the healthcare system
• Impact Cedar’s platform has had on patient satisfaction, collection rates, time to collect, and healthcare costs
• The strategic rationale behind the acquisition of OODA Health and the vision for the combined entity moving forward
• Florian’s words of advice on entrepreneurship, business-building, and company culture