Diabetes management device maker Intuity Medical has raised another $15 million in Series C funding in a round led by PTV Healthcare Capital, new investors KCK Group, and affiliates of Luther King Capital Management. Existing investors Accuitive Medical Ventures, Investor Growth Capital, US Venture Partners, Venrock and Versant Ventures also contributed to the round.
The company, which makes an automatic blood glucose monitoring system called Pogo, raised $40 million just two months ago, bringing the Series total to $55 million. Pogo received FDA clearance in April 2016, and consists of a test port, lancets and lancing device in one compact meter and cartridge system, allowing users to quickly perform a glucose test discreetly in public settings or when they are pressed for time. It doesn’t require individual test strips or a separate lancing device, and was developed eliminate the need for people with diabetes to carry around a lot of supplies to manage their condition.
“The additional funding will help further our commercialization in bringing Pogo Automatic to the US market for patients who have been looking for a convenient way to test their glucose,” Intuity Medical President and CEO Emory Anderson said in a statement.
Intuity aims to make it easier and more discreet for people with diabetes to manage their condition, as lack of simplicity or privacy can lead people to put off or forgo testing, resulting in poor glycemic control. One of the advantages of the Pogo system is that it requires just a tiny bit of blood (0.25 microliters) to analyze the user’s glucose value, which they obtain by pressing down on the Pogo test port to trigger an automatic finger lancing. The process takes four seconds, and the test strops and lancets are deposited in and self-contained cartridge that can be thrown away after 10 tests.
The Pogo system then manages glucose data on the company’s proprietary, cloud-based platform called the Patterns Diabetes Management System, which gives both users of the system and their healthcare professionals a shared platform to identify and manage important patterns and trends as they relate to overall glucose control.
