Our Series E and what comes next for Rightway.
Today, we’re announcing $155 million in new financing led by Francisco Partners, with continued participation from Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures.
The problem employers are paying for.
Drug spending at large employers rose 9.4% in 2025, compared to 6% for health benefits overall. A large share of that money pays for the supply chain around the drug rather than the medication itself. The largest Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBM) earn on the spread between what a plan pays and what a pharmacy receives, from owning dispensing channels and steering members to them, and from the rebates and fees tied to a drug's list price. Essentially, they earn more when the drug costs more.
Why we built Rightway.
Rightway’s co-founder, Dr. Ted Feldman, is a cardiologist. People have constantly asked him for advice throughout his career: Which specialist should I see? How can I manage this side effect? Can I get my medication for less? The reality is, most people don’t have that kind of access to a physician.
In 2017, we started Rightway as a care navigation company to be that doctor in the family for America’s employees, helping them find high-quality care and get more from their benefits. We built a PBM because we saw firsthand that we couldn’t move members to lower-cost drugs while another company controlled the formulary and the mechanics behind it.
At the time, we had a big idea: charge clients to manage their benefit, not to profit from every prescription. Most PBMs work like a toll booth, taking a cut of every prescription, and a bigger one when the drug costs more. We wanted Rightway to work more like a navigator helping people find the best route to the medication they need while charging clients a set fee. Our PBM charges one administrative fee per member, passes through every rebate dollar, keeps no spread or dispensing revenue, and owns no pharmacies.
When we started the PBM, prospective clients were excited about our new-to-the-world approach. We’d have a series of great meetings, but employers just couldn’t make the choice to forego the option that promised them the biggest rebates. While frustrating, it taught us a lot about what plan sponsors needed from us to make the switch.
What we’re doing to help plan sponsors.
When Tyson Foods became the first Fortune 100 company to move off a traditional PBM, it accounted for about 200,000 employees and dependents, speaking more than 50 languages, most of them hourly workers in plants who had little reason to trust a benefits company. The first-year net promoter score was +80 while the industry average for a PBM sits at +8. Biosimilar switches alone saved them $6 million.
Today, we cover millions of members. Forty-five Fortune 500 companies run their pharmacy benefit on Rightway.
The market has gotten a lot more crowded. Competitors think they can emulate our approach by splashing similar copy on their websites. The truth is, what makes Rightway special isn’t just our transparent, aligned model. It’s our care navigation DNA. We were designed and built by pharmacists to take care of members. Our ability to guide members towards higher-value medications is unmatched.
We know the frustration of getting sent to a general call center, which is why our service team is made up of pharmacists and certified pharmacy technicians and our teams are trained on a company’s plan design and population. 90% of the questions we receive are resolved on the first contact.
A guarantee plan sponsors can plan around.
Pharmacy benefits are complicated. Employers want to do the best for their members and for their bottom line. Historically, having the highest savings off medications felt like the best path forward. Large savings lead to lower prices, right? In reality, large rebates set the focus on savings instead of focusing on the overall spending. The issue is that employers thought they were playing checkers not knowing that the traditional PBMs were not only playing chess, they were moving around all the pieces while the plan sponsors weren’t watching.
At Rightway, we remove the opacity and the uncertainty. We set a monthly cost per member from each client's own claims history and projected utilization, including what employees pay out of pocket. Every quarter we compare actual spend to that number. If spend comes in higher, we refund the difference in full, with no cap. If it comes in lower, the client keeps the savings. GLP-1s and rare high-cost drugs, which most guarantees exclude, are covered at our net cost with all rebates passed through.
Where we’re heading.
This latest round of financing will help us expand the AI and technology that power Rightway’s PBM. We’ll continue using AI to take administrative work off our pharmacists’ plates, surface opportunities to lower costs and improve care earlier, and give our clinical teams the tools to deliver deeply personalized support at scale.
We’ll also invest in the technology underlying the pharmacy benefit itself, giving plan sponsors more flexibility in how they manage their pharmacy spend and members more choice in where and how they fill their prescriptions. The goal is a PBM that can make smarter decisions, adapt faster, and deliver better economics without adding complexity for employers or members.
When we started Rightway, we wanted to give every employee the kind of help my father gave the people who came to him: someone who knew the system, knew what to look for, and would do the work to get them the best outcome. This funding lets us bring that kind of support to millions more people while continuing to build a fundamentally better pharmacy benefit around them.
