A doctor's office that charges $150 a month and doesn't take insurance just raised $26 million to take its model national

• Parsley Health, a medical practice that charges a monthly fee and doesn't take insurance, just raised $26 million in a round led by White Star Capital.
• At Parsley Health, a $150-a-month membership provides access to doctors and health coaches, with the goal of treating conditions in a more comprehensive way than traditional primary care.
• Now, Parsley wants to bring its services to people who can't get to one of its three locations through a virtual service.
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Parsley Health, a new kind of doctor's office that charges a monthly fee and doesn't take insurance, is planning to take its business virtual.

The company, which operates three clinics in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, on Thursday said it raised $26 million to help pull off that expansion.

White Star Capital led the Series B round, with FirstMark Capital, Amplo, Alpha Edison Partners, Arkitekt Ventures, and Galaxy Digital joining in alongside One Medical founder Tom Lee and Flatiron Health CEO Nat Turner. In total, the company's raised $36 million from investors.

Parsley Health's approach of offering care for a monthly fee is similar to direct primary care, a small but fast-growing movement of pediatricians, family-medicine physicians, and internists. This group doesn't accept insurance, and instead charges a monthly membership fee that covers most of what the average patient needs, including longer visits and some prescription drugs at lower prices.

The boost in funding comes as investors are pouring hundreds of millions into companies looking to shake up the way patients go to the doctor's office.

Read more: Meet the 8 companies changing how doctors get paid and building the future of medicine

Taking Parsley's model virtual

Founded by Dr. Robin Berzin in 2016, Parsley Health is focused on functional medicine, which takes a more comprehensive approach to treating the underlying cause of a disease, looking at it more holistically than case by case.

For a $150 monthly fee, you get primary-care visits, nutrition plans, supplement regimens, and more in-depth genetics and microbiome testing. Parsley does not take insurance, and doctors max out at seeing a few hundred patients per year.

The virtual service will also cost $150 a month. To start the services will be offered statewide in New York and California, with plans to get into 50 states over the next six months.

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The decision to expand into a virtual service came from observing Parsley's existing users, Berzin told Business Insider. She saw that about 10% of her members were flying in for office visits, then would follow up virtually with the telemedicine services Parsley had in place for its existing members.

While the in-person clinics - including a new Los Angeles flagship location slated to open next week - will be a big part of the business, so will virtual care.

What's included in the virtual care service

"We will continue to build clinics and continue to offer in person care," Berzin said. At the same time, though, she said, "We also are building a vertically integrated digital health company to transform the health of people everywhere."

Through the virtual care service, Parsley members will get five doctors visits, five health coach visits, health plans, access to lab tests, and unlimited messaging. Parsley is working on offering some lab tests in customers' homes, so that they don't need to come into an office.

Prior to starting Parsley, Berzin trained as a doctor at Columbia University and the Mount Sinai Health System in New York. She then went on to start a company that provided a secure messaging platform for hospitals before turning her attention to primary care.

Along the way, she's seen a lot of instances of digital health companies with the hope of getting a tech-enabled care solution to catch on without fully understanding what patients and doctors would need out of it.

"I've seen a lot of digital health built that isn't rooted in the reality of patient care, and this fundamentally is," Berzin said.

Read more: I became a member of One Medical, a primary-care practice that charges a $200 annual fee and has plans to double over the next two years. Here's what it was like.

When it comes to how doctors meet with patients, Berzin said she doesn't think of it so much in the confines of either in-person or via telemedicine.

"The future is a hybrid and the future is agnostic," she said.

In 2019, Parsley started moving into pediatrics, offering similar services at a price of $129 a month, with the hope of providing better care for children and teens with chronic conditions. Berzin said that the current demand for the service is higher than what the practice can serve at the moment, but for now, the focus is on the telemedicine platform.