Toronto, Canada-based Figure 1 raised $4 million in a new round led by Union Square Ventures. This brings the company's total funding to $6 million.
Existing investors include Version One Ventures, Rho Canada Ventures, Investment Accelerator Fund, Ryerson Futures, Accelerated Medical Ventures Founder Zen Chu, and Rypple Cofounder Daniel Debow.
Figure 1 allows medical professionals to take and share photos with other medical professionals securely. As an extra privacy measure, the app also has a face blocking feature to automatically block faces after the picture of the patient is uploaded. For each photo, the provider can choose whether to share it with all users of the app or privately with select users, and search for images by anatomy or specialty.
Figure 1 CEO Gregory Levey told MobiHealthNews the company will use the funds to focus on growth, expand internationally, and build partnerships with hospitals, medical journals, and websites. Today the company released a new picture taking feature for its users. Now, users can also take a picture, which may look like a video, but is really 200 frames of an image. The image is intended to be radiological scans.
"So it really takes us away from the photo sharing into a more useful use case for doctors to look at radiological scans," Levey said.
In the future, Levey plans to add features that will let physicians curate their feed so they can filter out pictures they may not be interested in.
Even without new features, Levey said physicians using Figure 1 have found use cases for the app beyond what it was made for, which was documenting cases, discussing them, and finding comparison images in the app for something they are looking at in the office.
"While [the normal] use cases are important, the users themselves have discovered or taught us about a lot of other use cases such as real time quizzes with each other," Levey said. "A doctor will take a picture and do a quiz in real time, sort of informal continued medical education. Then we've got more meaningful use cases as well where people are using it, not to diagnose, but aid diagnosis. So people will post a picture and say 'Not sure what this is, what would you guys do?' and within a few minutes the Figure 1 community says 'Maybe run this test' or 'Ask this question of a patient'. And we've had some particular cases that have been extremely interesting because they actually helped diagnose a patient."
The app's member base has increased from 2,000 in December 2013 to 125,000. Since its launch in May 2013, the company said 100 million images have been viewed. A few months ago, the company was seeing 500,000 images posted every day, but recently, the number has grown to nearly 1 million. The app is available in Canada, US, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. The company will release the app in South Africa, another big English-speaking country, next. Levey is still figuring out ways to introduce the app to countries that speak different languages while still maintaining a good user experience. He has seen a lot of interest from potential users in Brazil, Japan, India, and Germany.
Figure 1 also developed a medical and nursing student ambassador program with students from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Columbia University Medical Center. The company has grown the program to 400 students at 200 schools -- two ambassadors per school. Those students get early access to the app to beta test new features, learn from the community and discuss findings.
Figure 1 hasn't figured out its business model yet and has not booked revenue. The company wants to to focus on growth first, but Levey said he found an "accidental" revenue stream when a healthcare company asked Figure 1 to license some of its data.
