As we do every quarter, MobiHealthNews has rounded up our Q1 2016 coverage into a handful of longform stories. This section is on M&A. Skip ahead using these links to read Q1 digital health news roundups about providers, payers, pharma, and funding.
This quarter, MobiHealthNews covered 11 acquisitions — 10 disclosed during this quarter as well as one we discovered and broke a year after it took place. One trend that MobiHealthNews noticed this quarter was that retail companies are continuing to buy up health and fitness apps for marketing in addition to their digital-savvy team and data, like the Honest Company acquisition of Alt12 and the ASICS acquisition of Runkeeper.
Here are the 11 digital health acquisitions from the first quarter:
Concierge doctor service One Medical Group acquired nutrition coaching app maker Rise for $20 million. With physical locations in seven cities, One Medical Group offers patients a digital-friendly doctor experience. One Medical, which raised $65 million at the end of 2015 from PEG Digital Growth Fund II and AARP Innovation Fund, has been adding additional features to its offerings for patients.
Framingham, Massachusetts-based employee wellness and engagement company Virgin Pulse acquired two employee wellness companies: Providence, Rhode Island-based ShapeUp and Australia-based Global Corporate Challenge (GCC). ShapeUp offers a social wellness program for companies and engages employees through team workout challenges while GCC has created a global fitness challenge program as well as an online platform for additional motivation and health education.
Chicago-based Huron Consulting Group, a global consulting firm with a significant healthcare business, acquired mobile health software company MyRounding for an unidsclosed amount. HCG will make MyRounding part of its healthcare group and make its software available to hospital clients.
Greyhealth group (ghg), a healthcare-focused agency owned by WPP that was a founding partner of Text4baby and an early IBM Watson partner, acquired The Lathe, a health app design and development firm, for an undisclosed amount.
Boston-based FitnessKeeper, maker of the Runkeeper app, announced an agreement to be acquired by Japanese apparel company ASICS for $85 million. Prior to the news, Jacobs spoke with MobiHealthNews this quarter about big plans to take on apparel companies like Under Armour and Adidas, which recently acquired some of Runkeeper's biggest competitors. His ambitions to take on those companies without the backing of a large, experienced apparel company seemed ambitious at the time, to say the least.
Another large retailer, Mattel, which is a toy manufacturing giant based in Segundo, California, acquired San Francisco-based Sproutling, which developed a health sensing wearable device for babies. Mattel also acquired all the assets of Fuhu, which is best known for developing a suite of tablets for children and their families. The Sproutling deal's term remain undisclosed but Mattel acquired Fuhu's assets for about $21 million.
Mad*Pow, a design agency with a specialization in healthcare design, announced an agreement to acquire gamified exercise app Hotseat from context, the communications consulting firm owned by app creator Fran Melmed. The acquisition price was undisclosed.
Scrypt, a document management company, acquired physician communication platform DocbookMD. Both companies are based in Austin, Texas. DocbookMD raised a seed round of $2.2 million back in early 2012.
Honest Company, an online retailer of eco-friendly baby, beauty and home cleaning products, which was co-founded by actor Jessica Alba, acquired Alt12 Apps in January 2015. MobiHealthNews broke the news during this past quarter though. San Francisco-based Alt12 is better known by its apps, which in aggregate have been downloaded more than 17 million times: pregnancy tracker and social network BabyBump, women’s social network and health tracker Pink Pad, and parenting social network Kidfolio.
Palo Alto-based health tech company HealthTap quietly acquired Docphin, a startup that makes it easier for physicians to find and read medical research, for an undisclosed sum. Docphin was a member of Rock Health's second accelerator class back in 2012 as well as StartUp Health's second class of startups later that same year. The company, which was founded in 2010, never publicly announced a round of funding but it appears to have raised about $1.6 million mostly in its early years.
Read on for Q1 2016 digital health news about payers, providers, pharma, and funding.
