“For this story, Axios anonymously interviewed 4 former high-level Amwell FTEs 3 Amwell SMEs, and reviewed quarterly financial reports & internal docs (incl one incident report). Founded in 2006, Amwell rose to prominence in telehealth and went public in Sept 2020 at a $4.1B valuation with backing from Google. COVID was a boon for telehealth at large, but competing solutions proliferated at breakneck pace and Amwell's path to success became muddied. Per one former exec, ‘We were trying to boil the ocean. Rather than doing one thing really well, we were spreading ourselves thin, which made rolling out new product features a lengthy process. Clients felt they were sold vaporware.’
Delays plagued the rollout of key Amwell features & integrations with major partners like CVS Health & Memorial Hermann Health System. Meanwhile, limited staff time was frittered away building bespoke products outside Amwell's wheelhouse—incl 2 diff tools for promoting clients' 💊 that lagged for months bc of issues with the underlying tech. Also incl was a women's health symptom tracker that was live for ~3 months before the client expressed dissatisfaction with it.
Despite staff & client complaints about such issues, managers and execs failed to streamline product efforts — incl investing in the right tech, avoiding over-customization, and hiring the right areas of talent. Those issues led to significant departures from critical staff beginning in 2021. Amwell has laid off another ~10% of its FTEs since Dec.
Amwell rushed to sign up clients for its signature telehealth product, Converge, before the platform was truly ready— overcommitting to customizations that ultimately slowed the endeavor's overall progress, and to projects outside the company's range of expertise. Billed in April 2021 as a suite of unified telehealth offerings for Amwell's clients, Converge has yet to fully materialize 3 yrs later. Data from analyst notes shows only ~1/2 of client visits took place on the platform in Q4 2023, but Amwell claims the figure is higher. Converge currently enables synchronous video chat, but few of the other features described in its public materials.
In its Feb 2024 SEC filing, Amwell lists as risk factors ‘our clients' acceptance of Converge and our ability and the costs to further develop it’ and Amwell's ‘inability to adapt to rapid technological changes.’ While Amwell was rolling out Converge, it was also contending with various customizations of the platform for each of its clients. That meant each technological update had to be run independently for each client, causing bottlenecks and delays
Amwell co-CEOs Ido and Roy Schoenberg have continued to project a shiny facade internally at staff meetings and externally to clients over the last 3 yrs. Tho Amwell seemed poised for lasting success from its start, the company has failed to meet EBITDA and revenue growth targets since going public. In Q4, Amwell brought in $71M in total revenue, an 11% YoY drop”
