Catching up with Kamana (LL19)
From founding to acquisition in 18 months.
Founded in 2019 by a travel nurse and two healthcare industry experts, Kamana is a rapidly growing leader in healthcare staffing and credential management technology that participated in Lighthouse Labs’ Fall 2019 cohort and was acquired by Triage in the Fall of 2020.
Lighthouse Labs talked to founder and CEO, Dave Dworschak, about Kamana’s journey, how acceleration with Lighthouse supported their growth, and what’s next for the healthcare startup!
Before we get into your Lighthouse Labs experience - you just sold a company! Congratulations - how did that feel?!
Cofounder, John Modica, is a travel nurse who was inspired to solve a problem he experienced in his work.
We did! We sold the company, we took a few minutes to celebrate, and then we went back to work. It’s not that we didn’t envision an exit, we just didn’t envision it this fast.
We knew we would need to raise multiple rounds of funding to keep afloat and keep alive due to the long path of product development and long customer sales cycle - now we bypassed Series A, B, and C to got to where we would have been 5 years from now but in 5 months instead.
We got into this to solve problems and there are still a lot of problems to solve. With the sale, we are in a better position to solve problems at a much faster pace than we would have been otherwise!
How did Kamana get connected to Triage and what does the relationship look like moving forward?
We were actually introduced to Triage, our eventual acquirer, during Lighthouse Labs. It was via a mentor, Alistair Monk. We had met Alistair during a mentor open house and he happened to be going to a nursing conference that weekend and offered to look out for folks who might be useful. He ran into Triage, pitched them about Kamana on the spot, and was super persistent to get a meeting for us.
It started out as a customer conversation but, as we got to know them, the transition from potential customer to strategic partner happened incredibly naturally. Kamana is disrupting the archaic technology used across healthcare staffing and credential management and Triage is embracing a powerful model shift too. Together, we are deeply aligned in our mission to improve the lives of healthcare professionals across the nation, while eliminating inefficiency and financial waste within the healthcare staffing process.
This partnership, and acquisition, enables Kamana to focus 100% of our efforts on further developing our platform to be the absolute best healthcare staffing technology the industry has ever seen. The whole team has stayed on and we’re growing!
It’s been a wild and fast ride - Kamana company has been around less than two years. Take us back to 2019, do you remember first hearing about Lighthouse Labs?
Clockwise from top left: Dave Dworschak, John Modica, and Kiere El-Shafie
Our team was distributed - me in Colorado, John in Florida, and Kiere in Virginia - and we had begun looking into accelerators. Pat Riley of GAN - the Global Accelerator Network - offered to chat with me about some option and he recommended 4 or 5 accelerators. One of them was Lighthouse Labs - he didn’t even know that Kiere lived in Richmond. but he did know that we were at the right stage and that some succesful healthcare companies had been through Lighthouse’s program.
We ended up applying to a few programs, and had even gotten into one, but when it ended up being postponed we participated in a one-week sprint with Lighthouse and we’re really impressed with the team and the program.
Then during a separate trip, we connected with the Lighthouse team while in the 1717 space and in just 15 minutes of casual conversation they made 5 email introductions on the spot. We hadn’t even applied yet!
When the other accelerator got rescheduled, the Lighthouse team was giving us the pros and cons - they really wanted us to make the best choice for our team and for Kamana, even if it meant not choosing Lighthouse. Safe to say, we were already sold on Lighthouse Labs.
“They really wanted us to make the best choice for our team...even if it meant not choosing Lighthouse. Safe to say, we were already sold on Lighthouse Labs.”
And then came 12 weeks of work - what sticks with you from your time at Lighthouse Labs?
Dave pitches at Lighthouse Labs’ Fall 2019 Demo Day
The ask and you shall receive mentality was real at Lighthouse. There were particular contacts we were struggling to get connected with and at one point Todd (Lighthouse’s founding Executive Director) made five calls in a row to get to the right person. His persistence was so impactful.
As far as process goes, we were all new to the startup thing. Lighthouse taught us to not have 10 North Stars but to focus on one thing - the power of focus was tangible.
They also helped us take calculated risks. I had been having a hard time getting connected to some execs in the health space. One night I was at 1717 late and there was a big health conference going on the next day in Las Vegas that I had decided was too expensive to go to. The team at Lighthouse convinced me to go - even if I didn’t have a formal booth I could still and be in the room where it happens. I bought a ticket that night and got on a plane the next day and I ended up meeting with leaders from 15 different companies that I never would have been able to meet otherwise - including our future acquirer, Triage! That risk definitely paid off.
Outside of Team Lighthouse, what mentors made the difference during the program?
We leaned a lot on Joe Kunkel, and continued to speak weekly up until we were bought, we still talk on a monthly basis.
Kailash Mathur and April Palmer were both super helpful. We knew nothing about sales and those two taught us how to build a sales pipeline and actually talk to people
We still stay in touch with Rebecca Gwilt or Nixon Gwilt Law - she was so impactful in such a short amount of time.
Garret Westlake from the VCU da Vinci Center for Innovation set us up with an intern after the program.
And Todd introduced to Eric Edwards of Phlow even before the cohort began - an incredibly impactful connection that gave us so much clarity.
Looking back on your experience, why would you recommend Lighthouse Labs to founders starting out?
During Lighthouse Labs, there were a dozen conversations that completely changed the way we were thinking about the problem or market or growth strategy or target customer base. We got the power of focus out of Lighthouse that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
Lighthouse Labs is a super genuine group of people who act like you should act as a founder. The team was brutally honest about Kamana, but also about what they did and didn’t know - it was a true no BS environment and if they didn’t know the answer, they found someone in the network who did. If you need something, ask for it!
The program gave our company the resources and the space to succeed - the amount of progress that we made because of Lighthouse wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
“We got the power of focus out of Lighthouse that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.”