The old SaaS crowd is getting ghosted by investors. It is the prevailing wisdom anyway.
Ariel Katz isn’t having it. He runs H1 a nine-year-old healthcare data company. He thinks the industry is making a lazy assumption. That every workflow software company can just vibe-code their way to oblivion thanks to AI.
Katz has a point.
“If you’re a workflow SaaS, you could vibe-code that.”
That’s his line to TechCrunch. But being a data provider is different. Much different. You cannot code trust. You cannot vibe-code years of messy proprietary data on doctors across the globe.
Some might call this a self-serving take. H1 sells doctor info to pharma, insurers, and hospital systems. It’s their whole job. But Katz insists Claude or whatever new AI model drops tomorrow isn’t coming for him.
Actually, the opposite is true.
AI builders need H1’s data. They are likely to be customers, not rivals.
The data H1 collects… is more valuable to AI model makers than as a competitor.
CVS Health Ventures agreed with him. They led a $40M round.
This matters. It proves the “SaaS apocalypse” is a myth if you have real assets.
H1 wasn’t even looking to raise. They turned cash flow and EBITD profitable last year. Growth is tracking over 40 percent for this year.
So why take the money?
The partner mattered more than the capital. Aligning with CVS one of the biggest health giants on the planet was too good to pass up.
Traditional VCs still chase the shiny AI toys though. The valuation mania continues elsewhere.
H1 last valued at a staggering $750 million in November 2021 when Altimeter Capital led a $100M round. That was peak bubble. Peak covid chaos.
Times have changed.
Valuations dropped. Interest rates hiked. Patience vanished.
Yet here is a nine-year-old company landing a significant chunk of change not because it invented a new neural net, but because it holds the keys to a dataset nobody else can fake.
Does that make the old SaaS models obsolete? Or just the boring ones?
H1 bets on the latter. And apparently CVS does too.
