This morning Wellth, maker of a mobile platform designed to improve treatment adherence through behavioral economics, announced that it scored $5.1 million in seed funding. The round was led by Boehringer Ingelheim’s Venture Fund and NFP’s Venture Fund, with participation from Leonard Schaeffer, CD-Venture, the Partnership Fund for New York City, and Yabeo.
“We are looking forward to working closely with our investors in this round to identify new opportunities within health insurance, life insurance, health systems, and the pharmaceutical industry,” Matt Loper, Wellth CEO and cofounder, said in a statement. “We hope to use these new avenues to establish a wider range of use cases to improve patient health and drive down costs for insurers and health systems.”
Wellth teams up with insurers and risk-based providers to give patients financial incentives for taking their medications and engage in healthy behaviors. The platform caters to patients with heart failure, Type 2 diabetes, COPD and asthma, as well as patients who have recently been discharged from the hospital following a heart attack.
A patient can enroll at the hospital and then is offered a certain financial incentive for a set number of adherence days. Users get daily reminders to take their medication that include how much money they will get for adhering. Patients verify that they have taken their medications by snapping a photo, which is then processed by Wellth’s AI technology. The company claims this leads to a 40 percent or more reduction in hospital readmission.
The company has employed some tools based on the startup’s behavioral economics research. For example, instead of seeing a monetary total tick up as they report their adherence, users see a pool of money that depletes when they miss a dose.
In January the platform announced that it was teaming up with Mount Sinai Health Systems for a pilot program. In this pilot patients could earn up to $50 a month for adherence.
“We are excited by the results that Wellth has delivered in its existing patient populations and look forward to exploring how the solution can be scaled across additional markets and disease states,” Debbie Lin, executive director of Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, said in a statement. “Our investment in Wellth is important to Boehringer Ingelheim’s mission to continuously seek value through innovation in improving the lives of patients and their families.”
Wellth previously completed a $2 million seed funding round in 2016 led by AXA Strategic Ventures with contributions from B-Fore Capital, I2BF Ventures Capital, Beta Bridge Ventures, and AltaIR Capital.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story listed the funding as Series A. The story has since been updated to specify that it is seed funding.
