Capital Raising Activity

Heartflow of Redwood City, CA raises $150 million; valuing the company at $1.4B

The product helps doctors detect coronary artery disease non-invasively. GE Ventures and Blue Cross Blue Shield fund are some of the existing investors. Welcome to the Unicorn Club!

Cytel of Cambridge, MA announces investment from New Mountain Capital

Cytel is an established analytical software provider to the life science industry. The company’s clinical trial solutions are used by over 400 life sciences customers including the top 30 largest pharmaceutical companies. Solutions range from reducing risk of product lifecycle to increasing R&D productivity. New Mountain is already putting their newly raised $6.0B fund to good use.

New mountain backs CenseoHealth based in Dallas, TX and Advance Health based in Chantilly, VA

CenseoHealth provides health assessment for health plans and risk bearing healthcare delivery organizations. Advance Health is also in the assessment business but with an emphasis on member engagement and readmission prevention programs. The combined entity will offer a deep network of physicians and nurse practitioners that will provide technology-enabled in-home health assessment nationwide. We must admit that payer services are still the more attractive sector for private equity firms.

Collective Medical, based in Salt Lake City, UT raises $47 million Series A

Kleiner Perkins led the round with Epic Ventures, Kaiser Permanente Ventures and others participating. Collective builds a collaboration network platform unifying payers, patients and providers for the most complex patients who require multiple points of care.

The company, which has been bootstrapped for eight years, claims to have the largest real-time care collaboration network across hundreds of hospitals, health systems and tens of thousands of providers including skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies and emergency medical services.

Collective has demonstrated impressive results. For example, Washington State reported $34 million in savings in emergency costs and a decline of almost 10% in ED visits in its first year of use in 2013.

Evive Health based in Chicago, IL raises $43 million

The company helps people to make better benefit decisions and sells its services to large employers. Evive is known for compelling engagement tools which ranges from ER/Rx steerage to price transparency and gaps in care.

New York, NY-based Fitness app, Aaptiv raises $38 million

We admit that the fitness sector is overcrowded. But Aaptiv is one of a kind. This is an audio-only fitness mobile app; probably the only one in the market. Audio coaching has been enthusiastically received by users. The company has built a $20 million revenue base in just two years. The app knows specific information about the user. For example, while running, it can warn the user about an upcoming incline and the speed that the user had climbed  it before. Pretty cool stuff!

Health I.Q. based in San Francisco, CA raises $34.6 million bringing total funding to $81 million

The company is in the life insurance business for healthy people. Since January 2016, Health I. Q. has sold $5.3B in coverage. The company partners with established life insurance companies and sells policies to marathon runners, vegans, cyclists and other health-conscious people with rates that start at 4% less than the traditional policies and can reach to 33% discount once the company can verify- for example- that the person can run an 8-minute mile. We love this “metering” model. It is about time for people to get rewarded for good behavior but we do acknowledge that the stratification of risk pool can be a problem. We are willing to take the chance if it means people will be incentivized to look after their health.

Syapse, based in San Francisco, CA raises $30 million of capital bringing total funding to $62 million

Syapse aggregates the best of breed analytics for oncologists. The company has had a few pivots since its founding in 2008. But the latest one is the most promising. The company’s Data Sharing Network puts the power of real-world evidence in the hands of oncologists who can view treatments and outcomes of patients across the country and use the information to improve treatment decisions. This is crowd sourcing at its best. Some of the new investors include Medidata, Merck Global, Roche Ventures and GE Ventures.

Prognos, based in New York, NY raises $20.5 million with total funding reaching $42 million

The company, which used to be called Medivo, has been through a few pivots in its seven-year history. Prognos helps life science companies predict disease early. Its Registry is the largest source of clinical diagnostics information in 50 disease areas with over 13 billion lab results and 180 million patients.

Via its 1000 extensive proprietary and learning clinical algorithms, the company enables clients to predict which patients can benefit from enhanced treatment. The funds will partially go toward strengthening the company’s position in the payer market. The company currently has relationships with 25 life science companies. In healthcare, data is king and this company has a deep bench of very valuable content.

VisitPay, formerly iVinci Health, and based in Boise, ID raises $15 million

The company’s automated platform helps patients manage their own accounts. The platform is an online financial engagement platform that provides a consolidated view allowing patients to see what they need to pay. The solution integrates data from the patient’s health plan and the data from the health provider.  The fact that the platform can integrate with multiple billing systems simultaneously is a huge plus.

According to the company, bad debt rates are 75% lower with their technology. St. Luke’s Health System of Idaho is one happy customer reporting a 20% increase in patient payment rates. The company has also signed up Intermountain as a new client.  

Ascension Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners led the round. 

Cedar intelligent of New York, NY raises $13 million in Series A

The company focuses on the patient responsibility portion, analyzes the patient’s billing history, their level of engagement with previous communications, and general payer and demographic information. Putting all these signals together, the platform generates data recommendations for provider to optimize all interactions with their patients. The system is linked to a powerful patient CRM  and can integrate with any EMR.

We know that the propensity to pay is highly personalized and the more data points available to the biller, the higher the chances of success in collecting. Cedar seems to have built a pretty strong eco system.  

Founders Fund and Thrive Capital are amongst the investors. Both have been known to back huge winners in the tech industry.

PathAI, based in Cambridge, MA grabs $11 million in Series A

The company helps pathologists be more efficient and accurate is diagnosing diseases. Pathology has not been seamlessly digitized. Pathologists are, therefore, limited to laboratory analysis of tissue sample. With PathAI’s technology, it is hoped that the pathologist can make quicker and more accurate diagnosis. The company is working with Philips to develop a decision support tool for metastatic breast cancer.

The round was led by General Catalyst Partners. The company had previously raised $4.0 million in seed capital.

Biolinq of San Diego, CA secures $10 million in funding in Series A

Another minimally invasive continuous glucose monitoring company. The technology is applied to the skin – powered by electrochemical biosensor. The sensor analyzes bio marketers in the interstitial fluid. The funding will go towards clinical validation trials and necessary FDA approval.

Diabetes is a huge business. That said, we are having a hard time sifting through which companies will be successful and which ones will not. There are at least 50 companies in this business and each with a slightly different technology. M Ventures and Hikma Ventures led the round.

San Antonio, TX-based on-demand care company, Ranger Health, raises $10 million in Series A

The company dispatches Physician Assistants or Nurse Practitioners to the patient’s home. This is under the direction of network of physicians. Target market is large to mid size employers. This business model has been tried in many parts of the country with mixed success. We hope Ranger will become a success story.

SwipesSense gets $10 million in Series B

Based in Evanston, IL, the technology stop bugs in hospitals. Solutions combine hygiene dispensers with real time data tracking to change behavior. The platform is also used for asset tracking and nurse rounding. The company has raised $26 million of capital to date.