'We're shooting for thousands of clinics': A Silicon Valley startup has been quietly laying plans to take on heavyweight One Medical. We got the first look inside.

carbon health founders

A Silicon Valley startup called Carbon Health has been quietly rolling out medical clinics across the Bay Area after merging with a Berkeley-based urgent care provider over the summer.
Carbon Health offers same-day appointments, easy-to-read lab results, travel vaccines and even some in-house medications.
The new network is quickly shaping up to be a competitor to larger health startups like One Medical and Forward — only it doesn't charge a yearly fee.
Eren Bali, one of Carbon's co-founders, also created online education platform Udemy and previously made Business Insider’s list of Top 100 Innovators.

When entrepreneur Eren Bali would tell his friends about his dream of building a physical healthcare clinic to complement the medical software app he'd created, they'd always brush it off as a joke.

But starting last year, 34-year-old Bali began making his dream a reality. He began working with Caesar Djavaherian, an emergency medicine doctor who founded a network of urgent care clinics.

This week, he's lifting the curtain on the project they created together: a network of seven medical clinics across California's Bay Area where patients can get checkups as well as treatments for everything from broken bones to colds and UTIs.

Called Carbon Health, the new company was born from the merger of Bali's tech startup — a comprehensive medical app called Carbon that lets you do everything from text with your clinician to order prescriptions and view lab results — and Djavaherian's clinics, formerly known as Direct Urgent Care.

Carbon isn't the only clinic startup on the block. One Medical, Forward, and several urgent care chains are all competing for similar patients. The private equity firm Carlyle Group invested $350 million in One Medical this summer, in a bet that consumers and companies will gravitate toward friendlier and more convenient ways of seeing a doctor.

Unlike its competitors, Carbon doesn't charge subscription fees and accepts most forms of insurance — meaning that it's often cheaper.

Since Bali and Djavaherian began collaborating last year, more than 100,000 patients have walked through their doors, they told Business Insider.

They're currently working with NorthBay Healthcare and El Camino Hospital, as well as three other health systems they're not yet ready to name. One of them is outside the state, the founders say.

"We want to become the preeminent health care provider in the country," Bali, who previously founded the online education platform Udemy, said.

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With Carbon, you can do everything from booking a doctor's appointment to viewing your lab results to scheduling a live video session with a provider — all via a single app.

Carbon Health has $9.5 million in venture funding from backers including Javelin Venture Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, and Elad Gil, the co-founder of personal DNA-testing startup Color Genomics and the former vice president of corporate strategy at Twitter.

But Carbon isn't the only tech-savvy medical startup on the block. Two other Silicon Valley firms — One Medical and Forward — offer a similar range of services and apps to complement them.

Yet they differ in some key ways: both charge a yearly subscription fee of $150-$200 (Carbon charges no fees), and Forward doesn't accept insurance (Carbon accepts almost all the major providers except Kaiser).