Ginger.io Raises $20M to Expand Its Population Health Platform, Starting with Mental Health
San Francisco, California (PRWEB) January 12, 2015 -- Ginger.io, the leading digital mental health solution, today announced $20 million in financing to accelerate the development and expansion of its healthcare technology platform. The Series B funding round saw participation from Ginger.io Series A investors Khosla Ventures and True Ventures, as well as the addition of new strategic investors.
Ginger.io’s technology platform uses data collected from a patient’s smartphone to help connect the dots between behavior and health. Developed at the MIT Media Lab, Ginger.io’s machine learning technology uses smartphone data and self-reported information to identify trends in a patient’s health and wellness. That insight is then shared with healthcare providers and care teams (such as spouses or family members) when the patient trends toward a negative health outcome—enabling timely, targeted and effective interventions that can reduce patient readmissions and visits to high-cost care settings, such as emergency departments.
“At Ginger.io, we believe there is tremendous opportunity to revolutionize healthcare by bringing new classes of behavioral data into the clinical assessment process—including mobility, sleep and communication patterns,” said Dr. Anmol Madan, co-founder and CEO of Ginger.io. “To achieve that, we’ve built a company that combines the best of data science and machine learning principles with leading clinical insights and gold standard population health management practices.”
Since the 1950s, the majority of innovations in behavioral health have been focused on the development of pharmaceuticals. But with nearly 1-in-5 Americans suffering from mental health illnesses and the cost of developing new drugs now exceeding $2.5 billion, the medical community is searching for new ways to understand, manage and treat behavioral health conditions. This includes management on both the individual and population levels. Additionally, today’s mental health patients have remarkably few tools to help them understand and manage conditions on their own—a surprising fact in an era defined by self-service and consumer apps. Ginger.io’s unique approach combines leading clinical expertise with user-centric design and engagement principles to support patients and providers across the continuum of care.
Such innovation has brought together investors from diverse backgrounds including Vinod Khosla, founding partner of Khosla ventures. “Ginger.io’s continued success in data science and acceptance by established healthcare partners demonstrates the game-changing nature of this technology.” Khosla continued, “We look forward to working with established organizations to bring Ginger.io to even more patients, leading to better clinical outcomes.”
The Series B round of funding comes on the heels of a strong performance year in 2014 for Ginger.io. Commercial deployments at Novant Health and Centerstone/CRI demonstrated strong results, including increases in patients’ confidence to manage their conditions, improvement in standardized health measures and decreases in ER visits and hospitalizations.
Additionally, public-private partnerships such as that created by Ginger.io, the Cambia Foundation and the Association for Utah Community Health (AUCH) have demonstrated how payors, providers, health agencies and technology companies can work together on system-wide redesign initiatives, including serving those in underserved and low-income populations.
“I’m incredibly proud of the many partnerships and huge successes the Ginger.io team has created since True provided seed funding in 2011,” said Jon Callaghan, founder and managing partner of True Ventures. “We have long believed in Ginger.io's vision for the power of smartphones to dramatically improve the quality of care across large patient populations, and we are thrilled to continue our support of this extraordinary company.”
Ginger.io’s portfolio of research collaborations also continues to expand, now including eight of the top ten academic medical centers in the U.S. with the newly announced UC San Francisco, Partners HealthCare (Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and McLean Hospital), Duke University, UC Davis and University of Nebraska Medical Center.
As of this announcement, total investment in Ginger.io now amounts to $28M since the company’s founding in 2010. In 2015, the company plans to scale its commercial relationships, expand emergent digital therapies and continue to build its team of industry-leading data scientists, application engineers, healthcare experts and user experience designers.
About Ginger.io:
Ginger.io uses patient smartphones to improve behavioral health in primary and specialty care. Through passive data and deep analytics, this mobile application identifies patterns in patients’ behavior and mental state that may impact their health and well-being. Providers can use the Ginger.io platform to reach out when patients need support and deliver the right care at the right time. Ginger.io is currently working with leading U.S. healthcare institutions including UCSF, Novant Health and Centerstone/CRI. A spinoff from the MIT Media Lab, Ginger.io was recently named one of The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Healthcare by Fast Company. Learn more about Ginger.io at http://www.ginger.io
About Khosla Ventures
Khosla Ventures offers venture assistance, strategic advice and capital to entrepreneurs. The firm helps entrepreneurs extend the potential of their ideas in breakthrough technologies in clean energy, mobile, IT, cloud, big data, storage, health, food, agriculture and semiconductors. Vinod Khosla founded the firm in 2004 and was formerly a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Khosla Ventures is based in Menlo Park, Calif. More information is available at http://www.khoslaventures.com
About True Ventures
Founded in 2005, True Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups. With four funds and approximately $900 million in capital under management, True provides seed and Series A funding to the most talented entrepreneurs in today’s fastest growing markets. With a mission to make the world a better place for entrepreneurs, True encourages each founder’s vision and has built resources to empower the employees, families and communities of its portfolio companies. The firm maintains a strong founder community and offers innovative educational opportunities to its portfolio, helping entrepreneurs achieve higher levels of success and impact. With more than 150 companies funded and multiple companies acquired, the current True portfolio has helped create over 3,500 jobs. To learn more about True Ventures, visit http://www.trueventures.com
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Joseph Grimberg, Ginger.io, https://ginger.io/, +1 216.570.8018, [email protected]
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