Healthcare services · Pediatric urgent care

Brave Care

A Portland startup that built kid-only urgent care clinics and wrote its own software to run them. It opened five clinics in three years, sold $37.5 million of securities on the record, and shut every location in December 2024.

The notice on the door

Around the end of December 2024, the front page of bravecare.com stopped advertising walk-in hours and carried a short message instead.

“It is with heavy hearts that we share Brave Care has permanently closed its doors,” it read. “It has been an honor to care for our patients and families, and we are deeply grateful for the trust you placed in us.”

Below sat the line that matters most to a parent whose child had been a patient: “For any inquiries or to access your health records, please contact Cariend, our designated health records custodian.” Four clinics went dark at once: two in Portland, one in Beaverton, one in south Austin.

The Oregonian reported the closure on December 31, the Portland Business Journal on January 2. Neither could say why. Both co-founders, the Oregonian wrote, did not respond to a call or email for comment.

What the clinics were for

The arithmetic was never complicated. American children make tens of millions of emergency room visits a year, and most are treated and released. An emergency department is an expensive and frightening place to hand a four-year-old a set of stitches.

“There are 25 million ER visits a year for kids where the vast majority of those visits are not life-threatening and don’t require that level of care,” co-founder Darius Monsef wrote the day after the closure went public.

So the clinics were built for children only. Kid-sized instruments, numbing gel before injections, waiting rooms that did not look like waiting rooms, and on-site X-ray, labs and dispensing so no parent had to drive to a pharmacy with a sick child in the back seat. Open every day, roughly 10am to 8pm.

A coffee, and a clinic that already existed

Monsef had sold his previous company, the contact lens service Sightbox, to Johnson & Johnson in 2017. The idea arrived, by his telling to TechCrunch, after a bad week in which one of his children went off a bike ramp and another started having breathing trouble. Both were seen by Dr. Corey A. Fish, a Portland pediatrician, who told him over coffee weeks later that he wanted to build more pediatric urgent care but needed a business partner.

“We don’t want the treatment of an injury or illness to be more traumatic than how you got it,” Monsef told TechCrunch in July 2019.

Fish already had a clinic. He had founded Pacific Crest Children’s Urgent Care, whose organizational NPI was issued on August 4, 2017 for 6924 NE Sandy Blvd. GeekWire reported that Brave Care relaunched in June 2019 out of Pacific Crest, which had been running that clinic for about 18 months. The registry record never changed hands: to the end, the entity billing payers was Pacific Crest Children’s Urgent Care LLC, doing business as Brave Care, with Fish as its authorized official.

Five clinics in three years

The company went through Y Combinator in 2019 and skipped Demo Day because a $5.2 million seed round was already oversubscribed. Sesame Street invested through Collaborative Fund, alongside Greycroft, Refactor, Fifty Years, Indicator Ventures and Founders’ Co-op. Sellwood opened in September 2020, Beaverton in 2021.

April 2021 brought a $10 million Series A led by City Light Capital. Monsef told the company blog what it was for: “We’ll soon get to a dozen clinics and continue on to hundreds of clinics.”

That September, Brave Care took over Cross Creek Pediatrics in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a practice Dr. Barbara Appel had run for 26 years. “I feel so lucky to have found Brave Care to take over our Cross Creek Pediatrics clinic,” Appel said in the announcement. It closed the following May, about eight months later.

Three weeks later Mednax, the NYSE-listed physician services group now called Pediatrix, led a $25 million Series B and put its chief development officer, Dr. Jim Swift, on the board. Monsef said the round meant “we foresee this as a clear opportunity to open over 100 new clinics in the next few years.”

The fifth and last clinic opened in the Circle C neighborhood of Austin on March 30, 2022, the only one in Texas.

The retreat

Five months later Brave Care laid off about 40 people, a third of its workforce. None were clinical staff, and the company said all four remaining sites would stay open. Monsef promised more: “We will still open more clinics in the Portland and Austin areas in the future.” None opened.

In 2023 the chain stopped offering primary care and shut down the parent app that carried the 24/7 nurse line. Both had been central to the pitch. On October 23, 2024, the company, by then filing as Brave Care Technologies, reported a $750,000 offering with $150,000 sold to two investors. Ten weeks later the clinics closed.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the care was real and, by every account that survives, well liked. What was never demonstrated is that a small chain of kid-only clinics running bespoke software could cover its costs. Pediatric reimbursement is thin, clinics scale like retail rather than like software, and the capital went into buildings and staff before the unit economics were settled. The lender’s marks tell the ending without commentary: par until September 2024, 29 cents on the dollar at year end, then three cents.

What to watch

• Whether the accelerated senior secured loan ever recovers more than the $24,574 it carried on March 31, 2026.
• Where the patient records sit after Cariend, and how long former patients can still retrieve them now that the website points nowhere useful.
• Whether Pediatrix, which led the Series B and held a board seat to the end, ever discloses what the investment cost it.
• Who fills the gap. Portland parents were still asking on local forums for a pediatric urgent care recommendation weeks later.

In their words

Related companies

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• Science Exchange: Also in Healthcare Services. A marketplace for ordering experiments that became procurement software for big pharma, and that sourced the laboratories for the largest public test of whether
• Vitable Health: Also in Healthcare Services. A Philadelphia company that began by sending nurse practitioners into the homes of hourly workers, and now sells small employers a federal health reimbursement
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Sources

1. Public recordNPPES, NPI 1164947701, Pacific Crest Children’s Urgent Care LLCCMS · May 30, 2023
2. Public recordNPPES, NPI 1871720136, Corey Fish, M.D.CMS · May 21, 2024
3. Public recordSix Form D filings, CIK 0001773236SEC · Apr 2019 to Oct 2024
4. Public recordVenture Lending & Leasing IX schedules, CIK 0001717310SEC · 2021 to 2026
5. Public recordMEDNAX, INC. Form 8-K exhibit 99.1SEC · Oct 28, 2021
6. Public recordRegistration data for bravecare.comVerisign RDAP · Sep 23, 2026
7. IndependentPortland pediatrics startup Brave Care shutters permanentlyThe Oregonian · Dec 31, 2024
8. IndependentPortland pediatrics chain with national expansion goal shuts downPortland Business Journal · Jan 2, 2025
9. IndependentBrave Care lays off a third of staffThe Oregonian · Sep 6, 2022
10. IndependentAn urgent care clinic just for kidsTechCrunch · Jul 15, 2019
11. Public forumBrave Care Has Closed, with comments by dariusmonsefHacker News · Dec 2024
12. CompanyBrave Care Joins Fayetteville, NCBusiness Wire · Sep 15, 2021
13. CompanySeries B release naming MednaxPR Newswire · Oct 7, 2021
14. CompanyClosure notice and records custodian pointerbravecare.com, archived Jan 2025