Biofourmis, a Boston-based predictive-care startup that's leaning more and more into digital therapeutics, has wrapped up $100 million in Series C financing. The raise was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and also saw contributions from prior backers Openspace Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Sequoia Capital and EDBI.
With this major jump from last May's $35 million Series B, the company is now sitting on more than $140 million in venture capital.
WHAT IT DOES
Biofourmis picked up steam over the last couple of years with a biomarker- and data analytics-driven patient monitoring platform called Biovitals. Patients would be provided with a proprietary wearable and a connected app, while an artificial intelligence takes in the data to spot complications before they occur and relay the information to a dashboard. The company pitched the tools to clinical care providers and drugmakers interested in monitoring responses to in-development treatments.
But over the past year or so the company has been steadily expanding its focus to the burgeoning digital therapeutics space, and alongside the funding news has announced new divisions within its business.
The Biofourmis Health unit will continue with the Biovitals platform to provide remote monitoring and analytics-supported care management, while the Biofourmis Therapeutics division will focus on "developing clinically validated software-based therapeutics to treat and manage patients with unmet clinical needs," the company said. These products will be designed to work either as an independent treatment or as a companion to proven pharmacotherapies.
WHAT IT'S FOR
As part of the shift, Biofourmis said that it would be using the new capital to develop, validate and commercialize digital therapeutics. These products will address cardiology, respiratory, oncology and pain, the company said, and be deployed within the U.S. and certain Asian regions.
“COVID-19 is pushing remote monitoring and digital therapeutics to the forefront of medicine,” CEO Kuldeep Singh Rajput said in a statement. “Our vision is to use digital medicine to empower patients, clinicians and researchers everywhere by providing software-as-a-treatment for patients with unmet clinical needs, from post-acute care to optimal medication therapy. With this new funding, we will accelerate our global expansion, advance our digital therapeutics pipeline, develop additional care pathways and drive deeper integration with our health system, hospital, pharmaceutical and clinical research clients and partners.”
MARKET SNAPSHOT
The past year saw Biofourmis acquire Biovotion, a wearable biosensor maker, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals' Gaido Health, an oncology digital therapeutics company, to help the Boston company compete in both of its focus areas.
In regard to data-driven health monitoring, the company is competing with a growing handful of companies that use wearables and connected vitals monitors to track patients' conditions. Some of these include Current Health, Datos Health, EarlySense and Spry Health.
The digital therapeutics space, meanwhile, is still working to define its role in the broader healthcare and pharma market. This area has recently seen regulatory wins and big-name bankruptcies, and most recently a new coalition of consumer tech and digital health companies pushing for industry-wide standards regarding the novel technology.
ON THE RECORD
“In the last seven months, healthcare has fast-forwarded by at least five years,” Rajput said. “Despite a challenging global economic environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we expect that our latest funding round will accelerate Biofourmis’ plans to rapidly scale to support more healthcare-provider, pharmaceutical and health-plan clients across the world. We will continue to drive an evolution toward a more personalized and predictive remote method of care delivery that patients prefer and that enables better outcomes.”
