Healthcare data · Provider intelligence
H1
A New York company that keeps a profile of roughly every doctor on earth and sells it to pharma, health insurers and now AI developers. Five acquisitions in five years, no regulatory record of its own, and a valuation that has not moved since 2021.
The phone call
In 2020 a large pharmaceutical company rang H1 with an awkward question. It was running a phase 2 trial, and it wanted to know how diverse the physicians running that trial actually were.
H1 counted. Of the thousands of physicians on the study, most were white men.
“It was all because of that phone call we got. We ended up doing it,” co-founder and chief executive Ariel Katz told MedCity News in September 2021. The answer became a product. H1 built features drawing on Medicare, Medicaid and other sources to describe the patients an individual doctor actually sees, and sold it into an industry the FDA had just started pressing on trial diversity.
That is the pattern of the whole company. H1 runs no studies and builds no devices. It assembles what is already scattered across the healthcare system and charges for the assembled version.
What it sells, and to whom
H1 calls the product the Doctor Graph: a structured record of a physician's identity, expertise, relationships and behavior. In 2021 the company described profiles on more than 10 million healthcare professionals across 84 countries, alongside 160 million peer-reviewed publications, 350,000 clinical trials and 8 billion medical claims.
The buyers started with pharma medical affairs teams hunting key opinion leaders, then clinical teams needing trial sites, then device firms, insurers and digital health companies. The reach is wider than the brand: H1 data populates the find-a-doctor pages on insurance websites, which is how a company few outside healthcare have heard of touches tens of millions of patients a year.
Where the data comes from
This is the part worth reading closely. H1's privacy policy states that “we collect publicly available information about healthcare professionals worldwide” and that it obtains this “from public sources (such as federal, state, or local records), social media, and third-party data providers.”
Forbes reported in 2021 that H1 began by scraping hospital websites, ClinicalTrials.gov and state medical registries, and also purchased private data sets from health insurers. Doctors are profiled first and consulted second. The policy does give them an exit: an expert can “opt out of our database by visiting our Privacy Preferences Center.” H1 has never published how many take it, nor how many of its 10 million profiles have been claimed by the doctor they describe.
Two people who had done this before
Katz built his first company, ResearchConnection, as an undergraduate at Binghamton University after failing to find a database of professors taking research students. The fix was the one he would reuse: scrape the public web, build profiles, sell access. It was acquired in 2016. Ian Sax had spent more than two decades doing the equivalent for finance, building the data business at Capital IQ. The name comes from statistics: H1 is the alternative hypothesis, the one that says an effect is real.
Buying the rest of the map
H1 has grown by purchase as much as by product. Carevoyance, a Portland medical device sales intelligence tool with six employees, went for seven figures in cash and stock in July 2021. London's Faculty Opinions, a curation layer over biomedical literature, followed in February 2022 and was relaunched as H1 Connect.
Then came the payer side. Ribbon Health, the provider directory API used by health plans and navigation companies, signed a definitive agreement on December 12, 2024 and closed that month. Veda Data Solutions followed in June 2025, and Defacto Health, a supplier H1 already licensed from, in September 2026. Each time H1 bought the piece of the provider record it lacked, and paid in cash and stock rather than cash alone.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| SEC filings | Four Form D notices under H1 Insights, Inc., CIK 0001837632, filed Dec 2020, Nov 2021, Jun 2022 and Dec 2024. Total sold across the distinct offerings: $271,036,555. | Public record |
| Ribbon Health deal | Definitive agreement Dec 12, 2024, closed late December, announced Jan 8, 2025. Cash and stock, terms undisclosed. The Dec 31, 2024 Form D is the only one of the four marked as a business combination. | Public record |
| Other acquisitions | Carevoyance (Aug 2021, seven figures in cash and stock), Faculty Opinions (Feb 2022), Veda (Jun 2025), Defacto Health (Sep 2026). All confirmed by dated releases and trade coverage. | Independent |
| Named customers and partners | Novartis and AstraZeneca as clients (2021). Carevoyance clients Olympus, Nuvasive, Insightec. The Michael J. Fox Foundation licensed Trial Landscape in 2023. Novo Nordisk signed an AI partnership in Aug 2026. | Company or partner stated |
| Customer concentration | “85% of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and 9 out of 10 of the top health plans trust H1”, repeated verbatim across releases since 2026. Not independently audited. | Company-stated |
| Profitability | Katz told TechCrunch in May 2026 the company turned “cash flow and EBITDA profitable” the prior year and forecasts over 40% growth in 2026. No audited figures public. | Company-stated |
| Security certification | No SOC 2 report or HITRUST certification found in public sources or on the company site as of Sep 23, 2026. | Not found |
| Peer-reviewed work | None. A PubMed search returned 15 hits, all unrelated; H1 is also shorthand for a histamine receptor and for the first half of a year. | Not found |
| Founding date | Company and Wikipedia say November 2017. Forbes reported the pair decided to launch in 2018. The Form D filings give a Delaware incorporation year of 2019. | Accounts differ |
| Headcount | Company figures run 250 (Dec 2020), more than 600 globally (Jun 2022), 500 (2023), and more than 300 today. No layoff was ever announced. | Figures differ |
Read plainly: the filings prove that large sums moved and that five companies were absorbed. The market share, the profitability and the growth rate rest on Katz's word. And the number that would settle the story, the valuation, has not been reset by an outside investor since November 2021.
What to watch
- Whether an outside round reprices the company. The $40 million CVS Health Ventures investment of May 2026 carried no new valuation, and the $750 million to $773 million marks date from 2021 and 2022.
- A Form D for that CVS round. None had appeared under CIK 0001837632 as of September 23, 2026.
- The Novo Nordisk work, including the StudyHub rights H1 is acquiring from the drugmaker.
- Any published security certification. For a company holding claims-derived data on 10 million clinicians and powering insurer find-a-doctor pages, the absence is conspicuous.
In their words
“It was all because of that phone call we got. We ended up doing it.”
Ariel Katz, co-founder and CEO, MedCity News, 2021 · Independent
“H1 is a global platform of every healthcare professional in the world and everything you want to know about them”
Ariel Katz, Forbes, November 2021 · Independent
“Our mission is to connect the world to the right doctor. They were doing it for patients. We were doing it for pharma.”
Ariel Katz on the Ribbon Health deal, Fierce Healthcare, January 2025 · Independent
“I’ve been trying to buy Ribbon for three years”
Ariel Katz, TechCrunch, January 2025 · Independent
“We have seen every major health plan using us and we touch almost all Americans who have insurance where they’re using us to find a doctor.”
Ariel Katz, Fierce Healthcare, September 2026 · Independent
“I don’t worry about Claude ever doing what we do”
Ariel Katz on AI competition, TechCrunch, May 2026 · Independent
“H1 is the right partner for this work with its domain expertise, AI-ready proprietary data, and AI technology to advance what we have built at Novo Nordisk.”
Mishal Patel, Group VP, AI and Digital Innovation R&D, Novo Nordisk, August 2026 · Partner-stated
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, H1 Insights, Inc., CIK 0001837632
- Public recordForm D, H1 Insights, Inc.
- Public recordForm D/A, H1 Insights, Inc.
- Public recordForm D, H1 Insights, Inc., business combination
- Public recordForm D, HealthX H1 Insights 2026, LLC
- Public recordH1 privacy policy, expert data sources and opt out
- IndependentTo make trials more inclusive, H1 wants to help find the right physicians
- IndependentThis Startup Raised $100 Million In Bid To Power All Doctor Information On The Internet
- IndependentH1 acquires Carevoyance
- IndependentH1 acquires research recommendation platform Faculty Opinions
- IndependentHealthcare analytics platform H1 has acquired Ribbon
- IndependentH1 acquires Ribbon Health to expand its reach to health plan, digital health markets
- IndependentH1 secures $40M from CVS
- IndependentNovo Nordisk, H1 partner on AI for drug discovery, clinical trials
- IndependentH1 acquires Defacto Health to expand provider network intelligence
- IndependentAriel Katz goes from undergraduate entrepreneur to data CEO
- CompanyH1 Welcomes Former FDA Commissioner to Board, Acquires Ribbon Health, and Unveils 2025 Product Roadmap
- CompanyH1 Acquires Veda
- CompanyH1 Partners with Novo Nordisk to Scale AI-Driven Clinical Development
- CompanyH1 Partners with The Michael J. Fox Foundation
- CompanyH1 about page and for health plans page
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
