Capital Raising Activity

Guardant Health based in Redwood City, CA raises $360 million

The company was seeded by Sequoia Capital in 2013 and has raised over $500 million to date. Guardant is another well-funded liquid biopsy company joining the ranks of Grail and Freenome. The main focus of most of these companies is on oncology and optimizing the best treatment protocol. The future of beating and treating cancer is bright.

Modernizing Medicine based in Boca Raton, FL receives $231 million equity investment from Warburg Pincus

The capital raise is both a primary and secondary issue; providing liquidity to funds such as Summit Partners. The company is a top notch EMR vendor for certain specialties such as plastic surgery, gastro and ophthalmology. The new capital will be invested in expanding the technology bench such as automating prior authorization, and data interoperability. One of the reasons we like this company is the fact that physicians wrote the software which makes the system fairly intuitive. 

Clover Health based in San Francisco, CA raises $160 million

Given the obvious demographic of our country, taking care of MA population is a big business. As an insurer, Clover’s members are only seniors. The company needs a lot of capital to expand state by state. Clover is still small compared to other MA insurers having only 16K members. But Clover charges no extra fees by going outside network hospitals and doctors and it routinely scrubs patient data to predict and manage member’s illnesses and conditions. The valuation is rumored to be around $1.0B.  Funds raised to date are $300 million.

Sharecare of Atlanta, GA receives $100 million from Summit Partners

Dr. Oz is at it again. The company has raised over $300 million to date and has made 11 acquisitions in the past six years. The company, at its heart, is a wellness engagement platform. Products are sold to payers, employers and consumers. Although we believe that the wellness space needs to consolidate, we are not big fans of serial acquirers in the space.

Blink Health based in New York, NY raises $90 million

Blink is a price transparency company that is focused solely on medication but it extends that capability to the actual purchase of the drug unlike GoodRx, another competitor. Over 57,000 pharmacies accept Blink. The company negotiates bulk pricing in advance and tries to pass along part of the discounts that the pharma pays to the pharmacies to the patient. Once the patient downloads the app, they can find the cheaper price at their pharmacy; keeping them from hopping from place to place. To date the company has raised $165 million.  The platform has over one million users.

Epic Sciences, based in San Diego, CA raises $40 million

Another liquid biopsy company with big aspirations. For many decades, scientists have studied the cell to understand biological functions and disease progression. Epic’s platform measures both phenotypes and genotypes for rare diseases. So far the company has raised close to $85 million.

VitalConnect of Campbell, CA raises $33 million

This is the company’s series C round bringing total funding to $65 million. VitalConnect focuses on the most critical patient population monitoring their vitals via a patch containing advanced biosensors. The device can seamlessly communicate with caregivers measuring skin temperature, heart rate, single-lead ECGs and more. We like this company. 

San Francisco, CA based Medrio inks a $30 million capital raise

The company is the only viable competitor to Medidata. Both are in the clinical software business. The heart of this business has to do with how quickly one can capture the clinical trial data to help CROs to quickly set up trials through easy to use drag and drop interface. The company has conducted 2,000 trials to date.

Science 37, based in Los Angeles, CA attracts $29 million of investment 

This brings the total capital raised to date close to $70 million. Amgen is a new investor. The company’s software is essentially a virtual network for clinical trials. It assists in patient recruiting where the patient can use telemedicine and remote technologies to keep track of their results. Furthermore, it allows the physicians/nurses to stay close to their patients that are participating in clinical trial. For CROs and pharma they can reach a wider population particularly in rural areas. Today only 5% of minorities participate in clinical trials. Not only this is an honorable cause, but it goes a long way to make these trials more successful.

Boston, MA-based Zapprx secures $25 million of capital

Zapprx allows pharmacies, patients and providers communicate on single platform for prescription management. This is particularly relevant for specialty and expensive drugs. Through digitizing the paperwork, the patient can receive their medications faster and Zapprx can collect data insights to the pharma companies. Company’s total capital raise is $41 million so far. Google Ventures is a new investor.

Assey Depot based in Solana Beach, CA attracts $24 million

Renamed Scientist, this is a market place that connects pharma researchers to various service providers. The system allows researcher to outsource research services. The solution also compares prices to help its clients manage a distributed global network of research supplies. The company calls itself a match maker and concierge service provider. We like that.

Capsule, based in New York, NY raises $20 million

Capsule is building a comprehensive pharmacy platform so consumers, doctors, hospitals, payers and manufacturers can exchange information about medication in real time feedback loops. That is the long term vision of the company. For now, when the doctor uses the app to order the medication, the system dispatches a messenger to pick up the prescription and deliver it anywhere in NYC within two hours at no extra cost. PillPack and another NYC-based company, Blink, also play in the same sandbox. The market is huge and inefficiencies are as big. There is room for many well-funded companies in this space.

OM1 located in Cambridge, MA raises $15 million as its first institutional money

The company used to be called Better Outcome. The business is essentially a sophisticated platform that measures providers’ clinical outcomes for CMS reporting. Increasingly this type of technology is becoming a lot more important for the system. We are basically bringing computation to an area that has had no “unit of measurement” before.

Livermore, CA-based POC Medical raises $14.5 million

This is a novel technology which allows physicians to have a point of care (POC) testing for breast cancer through a blood test. The technology will be rolled out in India first. The test generates results in 15 minutes. We love any company that can address breast cancer more efficiently, more quickly and bring that type of cheap screening to less fortunate countries

Mountain View, CA- based EchoPixel raises $10 million of capital

We love the medical imaging industry. Visualization goes a long way in helping practitioners finetune their treatment plan. The company has an interactive virtual reality technology that provides fast, accurate, 3-D models for a range of medical procedures. The technology can convert existing DICOM pictures into a life size virtual reality pictures. How cool is that!

Salucro Healthcare, a patient payment company, based in Palo Alto, CA in the process of raising $10 million of funding

This space is so crowded and yet we keep seeing new entrants trying to carve a niche for themselves. The king in the space is, of course, InstaMed. Solucro, like most others, focuses on patient responsibly portion of the bill. 

Doc Halo of Cincinnati, OH raises $11 million

We are seeing Bain Capital Ventures do smaller deals. This is company’s Series A. Doc Halo is a clinical communication company with solutions ranging from messaging (between care teams and the patient), appointment scheduler to finding in-network physicians. Looks like a solid offering to us.

Afsaneh Naimollah

Xen Partners

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Palo Alto, CA 94301
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