Everlywell, a digital consumer platform for ordering and viewing lab tests from home, has closed an oversubscribed $175 million Series D funding round, the Austin, Texas-based company announced this morning.
The raise brought in a slew of new investors hailing from BlackRock, the Chernin Group, Foresite Capital, Greenspring Associates, Lux Capital, Morningside Ventures and Portfolia. It also saw continued support from prior backers Goodwater Capital, Highland Capital Partners and Next Coast Ventures.
WHAT IT DOES
The startup's online consumer storefront offers home lab tests spanning the range of general wellness, nutrition, heart health, blood sugar, sexual health and – as of 2020 – COVID-19.
After ordering the test online and paying up front, consumers receive a sample collection kit through the mail that they ship back to the company. Within a few days, they can access a breakdown of their results through a digital platform and for certain conditions may be connected to virtual consultation services.
Everlywell also sells testing packages to enterprise customers such as employers or health plans.
In today's announcement, Everlywell said that it's delivered tests to more than one million users since launching in 2016. The company also sells testing packages to enterprise customers such as employers, universities and health plans, and said that it has closed over 100 such deals this year alone. In total, the testing company anticipates that its sales will triple in 2020.
“The pandemic has shed light on the challenges of lab testing for Americans, from unknown costs to confusion and inconvenience. We’ve been empowering people with a new way to get tested for five years and will continue to lead the way in a rapidly expanding space,” Julia Cheek, founder and CEO of Everlywell, said in a statement.
“We believe lab testing will be rapid, simple, and coupled with virtual care in the near future. This partnership with additional world-class investors enables us to build a transformative, multi-generational digital health company that puts people first – where they belong.”
WHAT IT'S FOR
In addition to expanding its share of the at-home testing market, Everlywell said in the announcement that it wants to flesh out its virtual care offerings, scale up its testing capabilities and infrastructure, and use its testing system to support clinical research.
MARKET SNAPSHOT
The home health testing space has seen rising interest this year, largely driven by COVID-19 testing and the broader shift away from onsite services. After a bit of a rocky start on the regulatory front, Everlywell, LabCorp and others received Emergency Use Authorizations for various approaches to at-home sample collection for COVID-19 testing. The latest development in this space was Lucira's molecular testing kit that handles both sample collection and processing in the home. Not to be lost in the shuffle is a number of consumer-facing telehealth brands, like Hims & Hers or Vault Health, that also began offering home-testing services during 2020.
Alongside today's round, and a $25 million raise also closed by Everlywell in February, the past few months seen a major raise from competing startup LetsGetChecked and an acquisition by smartphone-urinalysis startup healthy.io. Looking back a bit further into 2019 reveals even more investor funds for digitally-enabled home-testing startups, Scanwell Health, Thriva and, again, healthy.io.
