Employer Cost Control Vendor Castlight Health Going Public

Castlight Health Inc., which sells technology to help large employers better manage their health care costs, has formally filed an S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to conduct an initial public offering of stock.


Castlight Health Inc., which sells technology to help large employers better manage their health care costs, has formally filed an S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to conduct an initial public offering of stock.

The S-1 does not list the proposed price per share or the anticipated total size of the IPO. Castlight in early February filed a “confidential” document with the SEC that enables a company to receive non-public review and comment from the agency before finalizing a decision. At that time, Fortune reported the IPO could reach $2 billion.

Todd Park, co-founder of athenahealth Inc. and later chief technology officer in the Obama Administration, founded Castlight in 2008 with Giovanni Colella, former CEO at RelayHealth which became part of McKesson, and Bryan Roberts of the investment firm Venrock. Castlight offers a cloud-based platform that enables employers to design benefit plans and control costs.

The core of the product, however, is giving employees comprehensive information to track spending and quality to make better health care choices. The platform combines pricing, clinical quality and user satisfaction data from across the nation with analytics software “to calculate costs and identify patterns of inefficient behavior for large populations of employees and their families, thereby enabling employers to take actions to optimize benefit plans, reduce inefficient outcomes and foster behavioral change,” according to the S-1 registration document.

Employers can use the platform to determine and set the prices they will pay for procedures, such as a MRI, with patients paying the balance if their procedure costs more. Employees can shop for treatment and get information that shows what the employer and employee costs would be. The platform also can remind employees of the availability of lower-cost options. For instance, an employee visiting an emergency department for a non-life threatening condition would receive an alert suggesting use of an urgent care center in the future. “By empowering employees and their families with the ability to simultaneously search price, quality and relevant content on health care services and providers, we enable them to make informed ‘market-based’ decisions that avoid excessive prices and low quality or unnecessary care, creating significant value for employers,” according to the S-1.

Castlight has more than 95 signed customers including 24 members of the Fortune 500. Some of the well-known companies include Kraft, Cummins, CVS Caremark, Honeywell, Liberty Mutual, NCAA, Save Mart, State of Indiana, Harvard Pilgrim and Purdue University. The company, however, still considers itself as an “emerging growth company,” and is not profitable. “Our total revenue was $1.9 million, $4.2 million and $13.0 million for the years ended December 31, 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively,” according to the S-1. “Our net loss was $19.9 million, $35.0 million and $62.2 million for the years ended December 31, 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively. Our accumulated deficit at December 31, 2013 was $131.2 million.”

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