News and deal roundup: Babylon’s $200M raise, Best Buy buys Current Health, Virgin Pulse-Welltok, Devoted Health’s $1bn raise, Withings watch gains FDA ECG clearance

Babylon Health adds $200 million to the accounts–in advance of its SPAC. Babylon’s raise of $200 million (€173M) in a ‘sustainability-linked investment’ came from the strategic capital investment firm, Albacore Capital Group. With the SPAC and PIPE, Babylon will now have access to over $800 million in capital [TTA 7 Oct]. Whew! Mobilhealthnews, Babylon release 

A score for Edinburgh. Current Health, a biosensor-based monitoring and home care management/remote patient monitoring system based in Edinburgh and Boston, sold itself to US retailer Best Buy. The company recently raised $43 million in an April Series B, which makes its quick sale somewhat unusual. Terms were not disclosed other than it was a cash deal and that Current’s CEO Christopher McCann will be remaining with the company. Best Buy extends its reach into digital home health, following on their 2019 buys of GreatCall, Critical Signal Technologies for RPM, and partnership with Tyto Care.

Current had achieved FDA Class II clearance in early 2019 [TTA 7 Feb 2019], had piloted with Mount Sinai Brooklyn and in the UK, Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust for a post-discharge monitoring program, and recently had created a “Community” initiative to build diverse longitudinal datasets for decentralized clinical trials [TTA 18 Feb]. Current Health announcement, Best Buy release, Mobihealthnews, Healthcare Dive

The wellness app-employee/health plan engagement program area continues to consolidate with Virgin Pulse’s acquisition of Welltok. In recent years, Welltok has concentrated more on data analytics and predictive capabilities in its member experience and patient acquisition/retention platforms for health plans and systems, after a start in employee wellness programs. Virgin Pulse, which exited the Richard Branson universe (despite the logo) when sold to Morgan Equity Partners in 2018, is now backed by Marlin Equity Partners. Terms and leadership were not disclosed. Virgin Pulse release, HISTalk

‘Insurtech’ Devoted Health raised a hefty $1.15 billion Series D led by Uprising and Softbank Vision Fund 2, along with a long list of returning and new investors. Icing on the cake is that they are closing in on an additional $80 million in funding to accommodate an investor. Devoted is led by former athenahealth and government IT leaders Ed and Todd Park. It’s one of the smaller in footprint tech-based Medicare Advantage providers but combines their plans with health coverage via Devoted Medical, a telehealth and in-home care provider, and partner providers. FierceHealthcare

The ECG monitoring space is now a little more crowded. Withings finally received FDA clearance for their ScanWatch’s ECG and SpO2 monitoring, nearly two years after its introduction in January 2020. It received clearance in Europe a year ago. The cleared features are atrial fibrillation detection alerts, which advises users to take a 30-second ECG readings, and SpO2 blood oxygen monitoring for detection of respiratory issues. Withings joins the Apple Watch, Fitbit, Samsung, and the grandaddy of them all, AliveCor’s KardiaMobile, for ECG monitoring–but packs this monitoring into a good-looking watch. Mobihealthnews

Shouldn’t we be concentrating on digital therapeutics rather than ‘health apps’?

Where the money and attention are going. The first generation of Quantified Self apps was all about viewing your data and storing it online in a vault or graphs…somewhere, usually proprietary. Your Pebble, Fitbit, or Jawbone tracked, you crunched the numbers and found the meaning. At the same time, there are wellness companies like Welltok, ShapeUp, Keas, Virgin HealthMiles, and RedBrick Health, usually working with companies or insurers, that use various methods (money, gamification, other rewards) to influence lifestyle and improve a person’s health in a quantified, verifiable, but general way. What’s happened? There are now apps that combine both data and behavior change, focusing on a specific but important (again) condition, coach to change behavior and verify results rigorously through clinical trials. Some, like Omada Health, prove through those clinical trials that their program successfully changes pre-diabetic indicators, such as weight loss, decrease cholesterol and improved glucose control–without medication. This results in big savings for insurance companies, one reason why a $50 million Series C was led by Cigna. Another model is to work with pharmaceutical companies to better guide treatment. Propeller Health with its asthma/COPD inhaler tracker is partnering with pharma GlaxoSmithKline on a digital platform to better manage lung patient usage, and surely this will go through a clinical trial. We will be seeing more of this type of convergence in medical apps. (The rebooted Jawbone Health Hub is moving in this exact direction.) The Forbes article, while short, is written by someone who knows the business of apps– the co-founder of the AppNext distribution/monetization platform. He does achieve his aim in making us think differently about the potential of ‘health apps’. 

Rounding up the funding rounds of 2015–and the deals some would like to see (?)

Mobihealthnews rounded up 2015’s hot funding in the mobile health/health tech-related space, with helpful links to their articles. They cite as we have previously [TTA 16 Dec] Rock Health‘s flattish year-to-year 2015 total of $4.3 bn, but also StartUp Health’s bloom-off-rose 2015 digital health total of $5.8 bn–larger than Rock Health’s tote, but 17 percent off their 2014 total of $7 bn. If you consider the proportions: the top 10 deals raised $738 million–$130 million alone to the endlessly funded but yet to take over the world ZocDoc –the roster below $20m remains the longest, which is completely in accord with the lower part of Rock Health’s pyramid of angel-A-B rounds.

Yet Aditi Pai’s detailed summary strikes this Editor as useful in an unanticipated way. There is a certain sameness in the products and services of these companies, as if funders are seeking validation in similarity. ZocDoc, DoctoLib and Vitals–doctor profiles and appointment booking. Sharecare, Welltok, Novu, Noom, AbilTo, SocialWellth, Health Recovery Solutions, Jiff–health and wellness engagement programs/apps, many for corporate programs. Whoop, Sano, Sproutling, TuringSensor, Valencell, Moff and four others–wearables. Hello, Sleepace, Sproutling (baby)–sleep tracking. Klara, SkinVision, Spruce–dermatology apps. Beyond the gloomy forecast for unicorns (Theranos being the Child on the Milk Carton), how many of these corporate wellness programs, sleep trackers and wearables will be around in 2017? Mobihealthnews’ 2015 funding roundup.

MedCityNews takes a lighter-hearted (I think) look at 2016 deals. IBM would buy athenahealth mainly for its EHR and practice management data, plus data aggregator Validic, to beef up Watson; 23andMe, past its two years of troubles after stepping on FDA Superman’s cape, would buy PatientsLikeMe (endangering its community shaped credibility? 23PatientsLikeMe?) and the best–Theranos bought by Boston Heart Diagnostics/Eurofin (EU lab testing giant), which would reduce this unicorn to a pony…but one that might make it. Theranos also made VentureBeat’s list of Likely Carcasses in the Valley of Unicorn Death (to quote the article’s author). Chris Seper’s Deals He’d Like To See.

Unicorns to Series A–health tech funding gained in (perhaps) the nick of time

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/1107_unicorn_head_mask_inuse.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Money, money everywhere–unicorns get the headlines, but the companies are still (largely) small

Up until early August, this Editor would have assumed that our Readers would look at this funding roundup as a bracing windup to a largely positive eight months and a veritable Corvette Summer for healthcare technology funding. We may have to give back the keys a little sooner than we imagined. Will the dropping market affect digital health as 2008-9 did–‘out of gas’ for years? Or will it barely affect our motoring onward? Despite the Dow Jones average hitting an 18 month low today, we hope it’s closer to the latter than the former. though the new and big entrant to digital health investing is the country most affected, China.

Our roundup of the August Action includes ZocDoc, Fitbit, Alphabet, PillPack, Owlet and more, along with a few comments:

**ZocDoc, a NYC-based online medical care appointment service that matches patients with doctors by location and schedule, had the most sensational round with last week’s Series D funding of $130 million, giving it a valuation of $1.8 bn. It took over a year after the filing (June 2014) and was led by two foreign funds (London-based Atomico and Edinburgh-based Baillie Gifford) with additional funding from Founders Fund, which previously participated in raises of $95 million.

Though it claims 60 percent coverage in the US  and ‘millions of users’ (numbers which have been quoted for some years), ZocDoc won’t disclose profitability nor volume–metrics that would be part of any IPO.

Direction? Points given for deciphering this windy statement (quoted from Mobihealthnews): (more…)

What a big VC thinks of digital health

Bessemer Venture Partners has been a major investor in healthcare tech for over 30 years, not only with Rock Health and their eponymous fund, but also with WellTok, MindBody, Health Essentials, DocuTap and others. Observations from one of their VPs include that the IPO window for digital health has been only open a short time–six months; B2C and B2B2C sectors have been resilient, with ‘Uber for healthcare’ concepts like PillPack [TTA 14 July] gaining traction; and that they like a third-party administrator concept for employee population health called Collective Health. Rock Health blog.

Rock Health’s mid-year report: 2015 investment leveling off

Rock Health‘s 2015 report is revealing in one aspect–that the authors try to put a game face on what is a flat situation in digital health investment for first half. Not even the most optimistic of the digerati expected a lift of 16 percent as we saw in 2014 versus 2013 [TTA 2 July 14], but the 8.7 percent fall off from 2014’s blistering $2.3 billion to $2.1 billion in 2015 year-to-date was unexpected. StartUp Health’s report indicated a slower start to 2015, though slightly less, so the reports correspond. Digital health still is growing faster than software, biotech and medical device.

Other highlights:

* The top six categories accounted for 50 percent of investment funding: wearables, analytics, consumer engagement, telemedicine, enterprise wellness, EHR/clinical workflow

*  In M&A action, this year’s first half has almost matched 2014’s full year total, but with only 13 percent of the investment. Most are digital health companies acquiring others for small amounts. (more…)

IBM Watson decision tools expand, lands at NYC HQ

Confirming that New York metro’s once-devastated (post-dot.com bust) ‘Silicon Alley’ is increasingly attractive to healthcare and tech firms, IBM this past Monday opened its new NYC downtown headquarters at Astor Place for the IBM Watson Group. Our readers have been following the development of Watson in the healthcare decision-making process since 2012 [TTA’s article index here], primarily in oncology (breast and lung cancer), in the UK (via the RSM’s 5 June ‘Big Data’ conference) as well as the US. IBM Watson has smartly created Ecosystem Partners where third parties integrate Watson. The spread is fairly wide: travel (your Editor’s former industry), retail, veterinary care, IT security and support, cognitive computing and of course healthcare. Spotlighted were three companies: @PointofCare, Welltok and GenieMD. (more…)