Company leader
Mel van Londen
Co-Founder and CEO
Develop Health
Mel van Londen is co-founder and chief executive of Develop Health, a company in Menlo Park, California, whose software handles prior authorization, the insurer approval many prescriptions need before a patient can get the drug. He started it in 2022 with Ben Easton after a career as a designer, software engineer, and product leader, most recently as vice president of product at Canvas Medical, which makes electronic medical record software for care organizations.
Neurobiology at the University of Maryland
He earned two bachelor's degrees at the University of Maryland, College Park, one in neurobiology and physiology and one in business management.
Leading Product at Canvas Medical
He worked at the design firm IDEO and at the delivery startup Shyp before joining Canvas Medical, where he rose to vice president of product. At Canvas he approached product work through human-centered design and systems thinking, and his job was to serve two groups at once, the engineers building on Canvas and the clinicians using it. In a product strategy essay for Canvas he laid out the company's plan to let each clinic's own developers build the tools their care teams need on top of the Canvas medical record, with an open roadmap that customers could comment on.
Founding Develop Health
Van Londen and Easton, who had worked at the health technology startups Canvas Medical and Rupa Health, founded Develop Health to cut the paperwork between a doctor writing a prescription and a patient receiving it. Its software plugs into a practice's electronic health record and prescribing screens, checks a patient's drug coverage in real time, fills out and submits the right prior authorization forms, follows up with the insurer, and sends the answer back into the practice's system. Develop Health also turns that data into information for drug makers about where patients' access to their therapies breaks down.
Early customers included the online health companies Ro, LifeMD, and Sunrise, and the company supports more than 200,000 patients a month.
He has tied the work to what he and Easton saw in their own families. In a 2025 MedCity News interview he put it this way: "At the end of the day, a prescription that isn't covered or affordable isn't much of a prescription at all."
In August 2025 Develop Health raised a $14.3 million Series A led by Wing Venture Capital, bringing its total funding to $17.6 million. He plans to use it to connect with more medical record systems and pharmacy benefit managers, to move into approvals for lab tests and imaging, and to sell to traditional medical practices as well as online health companies.