H1 secures $40M from CVS, proving SaaS startups can still attract investment
It’s no secret that pre-AI era startups are generally getting little love from investors now.
Ariel Katz, co-founder and CEO of a nine-year-old healthcare data platform H1 , argues that not all SaaS companies should be painted with the same broad brush.
“If you’re a workflow SaaS company, you could vibe code that,” he told TechCrunch. What AI cannot easily replicate, according to Katz, is a company that is a data provider at its core.
That’s a self-serving viewpoint — H1’s entire business is built on selling detailed information about doctors to pharma companies, hospital systems, and health insurers — but it doesn’t mean he is wrong.
“I don’t worry about Claude ever doing what we do,” Katz said, referring to Anthropic’s popular AI model. He thinks that the data H1 collects on physicians globally could actually be so valuable to AI model makers that they are more likely to become customers than competitors.
CVS Health Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of the CVS/Aetna health giant, must agree that H1 is in no danger of becoming a victim of the “SaaSocalypse.” The investor just led a $40 million round into H1.
H1 wasn’t looking to raise capital, Katz said. The startup turned cash flow and EBITDA profitable last year and is forecasting to grow over 40% this year. But the partnership with one of the largest healthcare companies in the world was hard to refuse, Katz said.
Despite the strong financial fundamentals, companies like H1 aren’t exciting for traditional VCs who are currently consumed with backing AI startups at skyrocketing valuations.
H1 was last valued at $750 million when it raised $100 million in funding led by Altimeter Capital at the height of the Covid-era tech bubble in November of 2021.
Like other companies that secured capital just before valuations plummeted in 2022, H1 has focused on becoming profitable. The startup has also grown through acquiring smaller competitors and complementary businesses.
Domain Pick:
SaaSConsolidation.com — Naming the Post-Bubble SaaS Roll-Up
H1 just raised $40 million from CVS Health Ventures, and the details matter more than the headline. The nine-year-old healthcare data platform turned cash flow and EBITDA profitable last year, is forecasting over 40% growth this year, and — crucially — “has also grown through acquiring smaller competitors and complementary businesses.” It was last valued at $750 million in November 2021, at the height of the Covid-era tech bubble.
That trajectory is not unique to H1. It is the template for an entire cohort of pre-AI SaaS companies: raise at a 2021 peak, watch valuations reset in 2022, cut toward profitability, and then grow through consolidation rather than pure expansion. As AI absorbs investor attention and capital, the surviving SaaS players are increasingly buyers — and the smaller ones are increasingly targets. That dynamic needs a name.
SaaSConsolidation.com names it directly. The domain is a clean two-word compound that reads instantly to anyone in software, finance, or M&A. “SaaS” anchors the category, and “Consolidation” captures the specific phase — roll-ups, acqui-hires, tuck-ins, and the quiet absorption of smaller competitors into profitable platforms. It could serve an M&A advisory site, a deal-tracking database, an industry newsletter, a PE/VC research hub, or a marketplace for SaaS acquisitions.
Its limitation is worth stating plainly: it is a descriptive, category-level domain, not a type-in traffic play or a company brand. Its value depends on SaaS consolidation remaining a real and visible trend rather than a one-off. But that is also the point — Katz argues that data-centric SaaS is not easily replicated by AI, and if he is right, the data-rich survivors will be the ones doing the acquiring. The vocabulary of that phase is still being standardized.
H1 shows that a profitable, data-centric SaaS company can still attract strategic capital even in an AI-obsessed market. The next chapter for its peers is consolidation. SaaSConsolidation.com is a long-term position on that chapter, not a short-term flip.
Disclosure: This is an editorial domain recommendation, not investment advice. Domain values fluctuate with industry sentiment.
Source:https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/h1-secures-40m-from-cvs-proving-saas-startups-can-still-attract-investment/