Develop Health is on a mission to use AI to radically accelerate access to life-saving medications. By automating complex, manual healthcare processes—like benefit verification and prior authorization—we’ve grown from $0 to $7M in annual recurring revenue in just over a year, and currently help more than 200,000 new patients every month.
We’re partnering with some of the largest pharmacy benefit managers and payers in the nation, revolutionizing how healthcare interactions occur by eliminating human delays and inefficiencies. Our small, elite team of founders and engineers have previously launched and exited successful healthcare startups including Rupa Health and Canvas Medical. We are now scaling rapidly following a major funding round.
About The Role:We’re looking for a Head of Life Sciences Partnerships to win, launch, and scale relationships with pharmaceutical manufacturers, brand hubs, and patient-support vendors. You’ll be the first person fully dedicated to life-sciences revenue, translating our benefit-verification and prior-authorization automation into measurable therapy-access wins for brand teams. This role sits alongside our provider GTM function and reports directly to the CEO.
What You’ll Do – Impact in Your First 3-6 Months:Close Lighthouse Deals: Convert at least 2 top-30 pharma brands or hub providers into paid pilots, each with clear speed-to-therapy KPIs.
Build the Sales Motion: Design a repeatable, compliant enterprise-selling playbook—target matrix, qualification criteria, pricing guardrails, and approval workflows.
Create Credibility Assets: Partner with Marketing to craft case-study narratives, ROI calculators, and regulatory-ready decks that resonate with market-access and patient-services leaders.
Stand Up Governance: Establish contracting templates, data-use agreements, and pharmacovigilance processes so legal & PV reviews don’t stall deals.
Feedback Loop to Product: Translate brand-side needs (e.g., channel data, PA obstacle mapping) into a 90-day product roadmap with Engineering & AI teams.
Revenue Line for Life Sciences: Own ARR, expansion, and renewals across the pharma segment, targeting an eight-figure book.
Strategic Alliances: Formalize integrations with hub service providers, specialty pharmacies, and data aggregators to embed our APIs in end-to-end patient-support workflows.
Thought Leadership: Represent Develop Health at MAPS, Asembia, Access USA, and similar conferences—securing speaking slots and co-marketing with flagship customers.
Team Build-Out: Hire and mentor a small squad of enterprise AEs, solutions consultants, and customer success managers focused on life-sciences clients.
Market Expansion: Scope and launch adjacent offerings—e.g., real-time copay eligibility, medical-benefit ePA, and adherence analytics—based on brand pull-through needs.
Life-Sciences Network: Rolodex of VP-level contacts in market access, patient services, or commercial operations at ≥10 mid-to-large pharma companies.
Access Domain Expertise: Hands-on knowledge of benefit verification, prior authorization, and hub operations—can whiteboard a typical brand-hub workflow blindfolded.
Enterprise SaaS & Services Sales Chops: 2-5 years selling complex, tech-enabled solutions with multi-stakeholder deals and $500k+ ACV.
Reg-Savvy Communication: Comfortable navigating MLR, legal, pharmacovigilance, and GDPR/HIPAA reviews without slowing momentum.
Data-Driven Operator: Fluent in forecast hygiene, MEDDICC or similar qualification frameworks, and tying platform metrics to brand KPIs (speed-to-therapy, abandonment).
Our AI Stack: How our LLM-powered engine extracts coverage criteria and pre-fills PA forms—so you can demo credibly and spot brand-specific enhancements.
Provider-Side Flywheel: Where our existing provider relationships create data that unlock brand insights—and how to package that without violating payer contracts.
Evolving Regulatory Landscape: Keep pace with CMS ePA mandates, state-level step-therapy rules, and FDA guidance on digital PSP tools.
Built life-sciences partnerships at a health-tech startup that went from $5M → $30M ARR.
Experience selling into hub services (Lash, CareMetx, AssistRx) or specialty pharmacies.
Background in HEOR or outcomes-based contracting that can extend our value prop beyond speed-to-therapy.
Top Skills
What We Do
Develop Health, co-founded by Mel van Londen and Ben Easton, is dedicated to transforming the medication prior authorization process. Their product reduces form completion time by over 80% and increases approval rates. With over 10 years of experience in healthcare, the founding team has impacted 200k+ patients and 6k+ providers, holding notable roles at Canvas Medical, IDEO, and Rupa Health.
