Housing for health programs seek to move patients experiencing homelessness into permanent housing to improve their health and wellbeing. Upside, a housing stability platform built for healthcare, recently announced $20 million in Series A funding to expand its efforts. 

Operating across 10 states, Upside works with payers to identify, engage, and stabilize members before housing challenges become medical crises. The company says it pairs dedicated care guides with AI-supported housing orchestration, powered by a proprietary, curated affordable housing inventory database spanning public and non-public data. Upside says this model of care delivers more than 90% enrollment, more than half of members stabilized within 90 days, and up to 4x ROI in 12 months, while achieving industry-leading member satisfaction.

In the past 18 months, the platform has secured partnerships with more than 17 national, state and regional health plans and is now supporting four of the largest national payers.

Upside is led by industry veterans who previously built companies such as MDLive, Virta Health and Papa. Jake Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of Upside, was the founder of Papa, which provided social support by pairing older adults and families with Papa Pals, trained and vetted companions.

 "Housing is the highest-cost social problem in healthcare, and most solutions stop at the referral," said Rothstein in a statement. "We go beyond that. Upside places people into stable housing and keeps them there. This growth capital means we get to do that for more people, in more markets, more quickly."

Aquiline led the funding round with Flare Capital Partners and continued support from existing investors including 645 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Triple Impact Capital and Techstars. The capital accelerates Upside's national expansion, builds out go-to-market capabilities across health plans and employers, and deepens investment in the company's AI-supported delivery platform. 

Upside will deploy the Series A funding across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and employer-sponsored markets simultaneously.

"The health-related social needs solutions market is approaching the mid-innings of maturity. The first wave saw companies find success with population-wide screening and solutions directories, but stopped short of driving or guaranteeing outcomes. What drew us to Upside was the rapid cycle time of referral to engagement to success in closing key needs gaps, starting with housing, in a matter of months," said Dan Gebremedhin, M.D., partner at Flare Capital Partners in a statement. "We look forward to partnering with the company to further deploy AI technologies to ensure this valuable service is cost-effective and can be deployed to more populations with proven medical and benefit design ROI.”