{"id":196811,"date":"2025-06-19T09:44:25","date_gmt":"2025-06-19T09:44:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/196811\/"},"modified":"2025-06-19T09:44:25","modified_gmt":"2025-06-19T09:44:25","slug":"kyle-braatz-got-fullscript-to-1-billion-in-revenue-by-treating-every-new-business-segment-like-a-startup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/196811\/","title":{"rendered":"Kyle Braatz got Fullscript to $1 billion in revenue by treating every new business segment like a startup"},"content":{"rendered":"

CEO of Ottawa-based company details the slow and steady journey to a reported $2.5-billion USD valuation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When Fullscript<\/a> was founded in 2012, CEO Kyle Braatz saw two options: be ultra-focused and do one thing really well, or create the ultra-broad whole-person care platform he envisioned from the start.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Held to the constraints of bootstrapped capital, Braatz opted to take it slow, building each segment of his wellness tech business like they were each their own startup. Bolstered by the acquisition of Rupa Health in October, Fullscript is now putting the finishing touches on its latest in-house startup\u2014which offers lab tests\u2014and developing the company\u2019s next phase.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Fullscript says its platform has helped over 100,000 providers prescribe treatment plans to more than 10 million patients to date.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Braatz\u2019s slow and steady method has paid off, even if it happened much later than he planned. After years of steady growth, Fullscript told BetaKit that it has achieved $1 billion USD in revenue over the past 12 months. <\/p>\n

Braatz spoke on his company\u2019s growth in a fireside chat with The Globe and Mail\u2019s Sean Silcoff at AccerlateOTT, an annual summit held during Ottawa Innovation Week<\/a>, on Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t have much time for those \u2018pinch-me\u2019 moments,\u201d Braatz told BetaKit ahead of the event when asked about his company\u2019s rapid revenue growth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The anchor milestone follows a secondary deal earlier this year, which saw existing Fullscript investors HGGC and Snapdragon Capital Partners, backed by United States (US)-based Leonard Green & Partners, reportedly snap up $300 million USD ($408 million CAD) in shares at a $2.5-billion USD ($3.4-billion CAD) valuation, according to The Globe and Mail<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

BetaKit sat down with Braatz following the acquisition of Rupa Health in November, back when the company confidently reported $900 million USD in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and looked forward to hitting the $1-billion milestone this year. Braatz described his novel approach to building Fullscript, and expressed how he\u2019s just excited to build the company\u2019s next \u201cmoonshot\u201d from scratch again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we have this thing we want to invest in, don\u2019t go right to the end state immediately,\u201d Braatz told BetaKit. \u201cIt sounds like common sense, but let\u2019s just start and go through the process of getting there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fullscript plays in the wellness space, which mostly includes complementary and alternative medicine, although conventional medical providers do use its platform. According to the Global Wellness Institute<\/a>, wellness is the active pursuit of activities, choices, and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health. Wellness is a massive, continuously growing industry that was worth $6.3 trillion globally in 2023 after increasing in value by 25 percent over four years, according to Bloomberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fullscript fits in by helping wellness practitioners provide end-to-end \u201cwhole person care.\u201d Its e-commerce solution includes a platform for selling wellness supplements, while also providing access to lab testing and tools that connect clients to their wellness practitioners. Fullscript says its platform has helped over 100,000 providers prescribe treatment plans to more than 10 million patients to date.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Braatz has deep ties to the Ottawa community, which he credits as critical to his company\u2019s success. Originally hailing from Newfoundland, he came to the city from for school and never left, growing up knowing key figures at fellow Ottawa-based e-commerce giant Shopify, like current president Harley Finkelstein and CEO Tobi L\u00fctke, who \u201calways had a lot of time\u201d for him when he was starting out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery single individual that\u2019s building in Ottawa, we\u2019re building because we want to make an impact; building because we\u2019re passionate about building,\u201d Braatz said at AccelerateOTT. \u201cI think what that builds is actually a community of people that want to help each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Braatz is also a minority owner of the Ottawa Senators, and was centre-stage alongside his wife Rachel when they donated $2 million<\/a> to the Senators Community Foundation, which works with the Children\u2019s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), as part of the hockey team\u2019s annual gala earlier this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEntrepreneurs get so focused on their one thing in their life, entrepreneurship,\u201d Braatz said on stage while speaking about the Ottawa tech community. \u201cGuess what? You need time to refresh. You need time to get away from what you\u2019re doing every single day, and there\u2019s such an opportunity to just get joy out of helping other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Figuring it out<\/p>\n

In the company\u2019s early days, Braatz told BetaKit that he wrote a \u201csuper secret plan.\u201d While it\u2019s five years behind schedule, it outlined each of the \u201cadjacencies\u201d Braatz was intent on delivering through Fullscript, with step one set to help practitioners with carrying inventory and managing their prescription workflow, and encouraging patient adherence. The company started to expand its focus beyond dispensing supplements and more into practitioner workflow, first through electronic health record integrations and then into\u00a0clinical decision support. Its platform can now help practitioners streamline a patient\u2019s supplement prescriptions to more manageable pill counts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe [a practitioner] has just written a protocol with 12 bottles, or 12 pills, but we have the same ingredient profile in three products with six pills,\u201d Braatz explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fullscript didn\u2019t need much external financial support along the way. The company hit profitability when it achieved $40 million ARR in 2018, bootstrapping nearly the entire way except for $2 million in angel funding, before it secured a $25-million Series B round in 2019 that went straight to its balance sheet. Fullscript\u2019s early approach parallels other Canadian healthtech companies that have scaled through revenue without much equity financing, such as Vancouver-based practice management software developer Jane<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Kyle Braatz at the Fulscript office in Ottawa. Image courtesy Alex Riehl for BetaKit.<\/p>\n

At the time, Fullscript focused on the software and customer support while relying on a partner to deliver the physical products, but started to realize the importance of owning the end-to-end experience when it experienced troubles with an early distribution partner, Emerson Ecologics. This led to Fullscript acquiring Natural Partners, Emerson\u2019s biggest competitor, in 2018.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom a physical perspective, you start relying on a partner to ship products, and they\u2019re screwing things up, and the unboxing isn\u2019t good enough, like it just didn\u2019t represent the Fullscript brand,\u201d Braatz told BetaKit. \u201cFrom a margin profile perspective, [as] a capital efficient business, we needed to improve our [profit and loss] statement.\u201d<\/p>\n

The merger doubled Fullscript to an $80-million revenue business, a number that reliably grew each year until it hit $300 million in 2021. That\u2019s when HGGC and Snapdragon Capital Partners bought in<\/a> through a $300-million CAD ($240 million USD) investment in Fullscript. While the round was largely secondary, Braatz said it also supported Fullscript\u2019s acquisition<\/a> of its originally troublesome distribution partner, Emerson Ecologics, which once again doubled the company\u2019s revenue to $600 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Fullscript\u2019s first acquisition was about owning the customer experience, the company\u2019s second was about establishing its market leadership.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cNo startup just goes out and spends $100 million on something; they raise $2 million and spend $30,000 a month figuring it out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kyle Braatz<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The acquisition thesis \u201cwas more along the lines of continuing our focus on market leadership and then leverage that scale in the market, and earn the right to now enter those adjacencies, like labs, or innovate more on the supplement side,\u201d Braatz said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fullscript then launched an in-house startup to build out its labs offering, complete with a founding team that had its own CEO, head of engineering, and others responsible for specific segments. They operated on their own incentives based on a budget, as Braatz believes that \u201cefficiencies and constraints drive the outcomes\u201d they want.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think a lot of companies rush to invest before they\u2019ve built out the learning, because they forget that every [new] feature and functionality is still a startup,\u201d Braatz said. \u201cNo startup just goes out and spends $100 million on something; they raise $2 million and spend $30,000 a month figuring it out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once the labs segment was validated and began to be absorbed into the broader business, Fullscript nabbed Rupa Labs for an undisclosed sum so it could bring the whole suite of services together at once. The completed labs segment allows providers using Fullscript to offer patients end-to-end diagnostic labs and specialty testing, with a single place to recommend, manage, and review lab results.<\/p>\n

Braatz said the Rupa acquisition was \u201cfairly immaterial\u201d\u00a0 considering the overall size of the business, but \u201cvery material\u201d in terms of its value to providers and patients.<\/p>\n

Having achieved a major revenue milestone, Fullscript will be investing most of its capital on core optimizations and its innovation bucket, such as clinical decision support tools and lab optimizations. Of course, there\u2019s a little set aside for its next aspirational moonshot, which Braatz called \u201cpreventive journeys,\u201d though that\u2019s going to be gated by success it sees, just like any other startup.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels like a startup again,\u201d Braatz said. \u201cYou go through these different M&A deals, and I love doing it \u2026 but it\u2019s really nice to be back to this mindset of building and creating, and doing so at a rapid pace.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

RELATED: Clio\u2019s record-breaking funding round explains 2024\u2019s public market exodus<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Despite being startup-minded, Braatz sees an initial public offering (IPO) as the way forward. Much like many of its Canadian tech peers<\/a> over the past year, Fullscript has avoided the IPO market in favour of keeping liquid cash flowing through secondary rounds. Braatz said there\u2019s lots of factors the company wants to \u201cprove out\u201d before doing so, and doesn\u2019t have any specific timeline or milestone that would trigger the process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the potential to be a household name when it comes to the company we build,\u201d Braatz told BetaKit. \u201cWe have profitability, we have a strong team, we have all of the attributes that a good public company has, it\u2019s just a matter of when.\u201d<\/p>\n

On stage, Silcoff asked Braatz to speak more about his company\u2019s potential future as a public company, and whether Braatz thought he was the right person to lead it at that stage. While Braatz said he would love Fullscript to stay private as long as possible, at a certain point investors expect liquidity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe likely will get to a point where maybe we\u2019re too big to stay private,\u201d Braatz said. \u201cWe\u2019re just learning what this company should look like in order to set it up for success, and if I\u2019ll be there [post-IPO]? We\u2019ll see.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Feature image courtesy Invest Ottawa\/Lindsey Gibeau Photography.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CEO of Ottawa-based company details the slow and steady journey to a reported $2.5-billion USD valuation. When…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3094],"tags":[79894,51,3134,920,126,79890,22983,79892,79895,79891,6937,32994,79893,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-196811","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-accelerateott","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-entrepreneurship","11":"tag-events","12":"tag-features","13":"tag-fullscript","14":"tag-healthtech","15":"tag-hggc","16":"tag-invest-ottawa","17":"tag-kyle-braatz","18":"tag-ontario","19":"tag-ottawa","20":"tag-snapdragon-capital-partners","21":"tag-uk","22":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114709388820697686","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}