Babylon Health to enter US market with two large strategic partners: report

An apparently exclusive report in Mobihealthnews confirms the recent speculation that Babylon Health is entering the US market starting next month with its smartphone-based chat and triage service. Kurt Blasena, Babylon’s senior managing director of commercial strategy and revenue growth, said at the October Digital Health Innovation Summit in Boston that there are two current partners and a projected additional one to three more in 2020. The hints were that they were two “very large” strategic partners and one implementation will be for the state Medicaid market. The partners were not named, which leads this Editor to guess that the Medicaid implementation hasn’t been cleared with its state yet.

Babylon is experienced at international rollouts but not the US market. According to Mr. Blasena, they been busy localizing the service for the US by adapting the chatbot’s natural language processing system and hiring US-based staff. Part of the US difference is negotiating through how local healthcare is delivered, plus the thicket (this Editor is being kind) of Federal, state, and local regulations.

Right now their US operations are in a Prospect Heights, Brooklyn NYC apartment and in a WeWork in Austin, Texas. Mr. Blasena, according to his LinkedIn profile, is resident in San Diego.

Babylon Health has abundant cash on hand from a $550 million August Series C led by the Saudi Arabia Investment fund along with previous investors Kinnevik AB and Vostok plus new investor Munich Re. The stated intent was to expand into the US and other international markets in addition to presently being in Rwanda and Canada. Release  Stay tuned….

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