Digital therapeutics platform Biofourmis has raised $35 million in a Series B financing round led by Sequoia India and MassMutual Ventures, the venture fund of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company.EDBI, the investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board and Chinese online healthcare platform Jianke also participated in this funding round along with existing investors Openspace Ventures, Aviva Ventures, and SGInnovate.
The Singapore-based startup will use the capital raised to improve its proprietary artificial intelligence-powered digital therapeutics platform and pipeline that treats and manages a range of complex chronic conditions.
Biofourmis will also expand its commercialization efforts in the United States and Asia and expand its teams focused on data science, clinical and regulatory, and sales and operations. It aims to have 100 employees across the United States and Singapore by the end of 2019.
As part of this expansion, the company said it is expanding its Boston office and moving its headquarters from Singapore to Boston.Established in 2015, Biofourmis combines artificial intelligence, evidence-based therapeutic interventions, a patient-facing companion app, and FDA-approved wearable biosensors to optimize patient care and health outcomes.
The company’s health analytics platform Biovitals continuously analyzes data from the wearable sensors and other patient-generated data to create unique digital biomarkers reflecting the health status of patients. These are then fed into electronic health record (EHR) systems to alert medical professionals whenever an intervention is necessary.
The platform claims that it can detect serious changes in an individual’s health status, days before a critical medical event and prevent them. It is also used along with Biofourmis’ prescription software BiovitalsHF that uses wearable biosensors and pharmacotherapy to manage and support patients diagnosed with heart failure.
“Our core focus has always been to optimize therapies to augment patient care and health outcomes. Our new funds will allow us to rapidly expand our workforce and commercialization efforts, while further demonstrating the clinical efficacy of our digital therapeutics platform through research and development” said Biofourmis founder and CEO Kuldeep Singh Rajput.
Going forward, the company said will develop its product and treatment algorithms through a biopharmaceutical approach such as randomized clinical trials and clinical data generation.
“Our products would then have treatment claims akin to a drug, and they would need to be prescribed by a clinician,” said Rajput “Insurance providers could then reimburse for the treatment just as they do with pharmaceuticals and therapeutic medical devices. Hence our commercialization strategy will involve forming partnerships with global pharmaceutical companies. We aim to use them as a distribution channel to commercialize our digital therapeutics product in combination with a therapy—either as a value-added service or as companion therapeutics.”
In March this year, Biofourmis joined the American Heart Association’s Center for Health Technology & Innovation’s Innovator Network to deliver personalized software-based intervention including dose changes, heart failure education and insights to patients with heart failure. It has also partnered with various healthcare stakeholders like Mayo Clinic, Novartis, Mundipharma, BioTelemetry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Singapore’s National Heart Centre among others.
