Founded by practicing physicians, Kin translates medical appointments into plain language, allowing patients to build a personal health record from the only source that actually works

Los Angeles-based Kin Health, a free app that allows patients to remember and act upon doctors’ advice, has announced a $9 million seed round led by Maveron, with participation from Town Hall Ventures, Flex Capital, Eniac Ventures, The Family Fund, Pear VC, Watershed Ventures, Foundry Square Capital and individual investors, including GoodRx co-founders Doug Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek, Nabeel Quryshi, Jay Desai, Alex Cohen, Saharsh Patel and more than 30 physicians.

The company is building the first consumer health platform designed around the physician-patient conversation, starting with a free app that records medical visits and turns them into easy-to-read summaries patients can easily act upon and share.

Despite decades of investment in healthcare technology, Kin Health asserts that the general patient experience has not changed and that patients are forced to absorb critical information in their hardest moments. The result: Data shows that patients accurately recall only 49% of decisions and recommendations from these visits (38% for patients without a high school education) and that roughly half forget their treatment plans entirely.

For years, innovation has been focused on the provider’s side – better tools for documentation, billing, clinical decision-making – and ambient scribe technology has become commonplace (currently at 75%-90% adoption within major health systems). But Kin asserts that no one has built the equivalent for the person sitting across the table.

Kin aims to close that gap with an always-free app that captures the physician-patient conversation and turns it into a clear summary of what happened and what to do next. As patients use Kin across appointments, the app builds a longitudinal health record grounded in what their doctors actually said, organized for them and shareable with caregivers and loved ones.

Kin was founded by Arpan and Amit Parikh, brothers and practicing physicians who have seen the problem from every angle, and Kyle Alwyn, founder of HeyDoctor (a consumer healthcare startup acquired by GoodRx).

“You need to have felt this problem to build the solution to it. We know how powerful – and overwhelming – provider conversations can be,” said Amit Parikh, MD. “All patients want to leave the exam room with a better understanding of what’s happening in their body and what they can do next. Kin gives them a tool to do that.”

“The most important moment in a patient’s care is the conversation with their doctor. Everything else – adherence, follow-through, outcomes – flows from whether they understood it,” said Arpan Parikh, MD, who also serves as CEO of Kin Health. “So far, that moment hasn’t been addressed for patients. We built Kin to change that.”

Joining them are Doug Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek, co-founders of GoodRx, as Kin’s founding partners and executive chairmen.

“We spent a decade proving that consumer health could be a real business without charging patients,” said Hirsch. “Kin is the next version of that thesis, starting earlier in the care journey.”

Like GoodRx, Kin will always be free for patients – revenue stems from the specialist referrals, labs and prescriptions that naturally follow a medical appointment, not from the patients who need them.

“The best consumer health products remove friction without asking anything in return,” said Alwyn, who also serves as CTO. “We build tools that allow patients to actually follow through on their care and only succeed when they do so.”

Kin will use the seed funding to expand its consumer product, deepen its health record capabilities, continue building a best-in-class clinical quality and rigor engine, and begin rolling out downstream care navigation features to turn its understanding layer into an action layer for patients and their loved ones.

“Patients in the U.S. go to about one billion physician appointments every year, and until now, they’ve walked out of every single one without a reliable record of what was said,” said Natalie Dillon, partner at Maveron. “It’s the most universal friction point in healthcare, and we couldn’t imagine a stronger team to fix it.”

Information for this article was sourced from Kin Health.