Devices & Diagnostics, Diagnostics, Startups

Bringing flu & fertility diagnostics into the home: Startup Cue gets a $7.5M Series A

A much buzzed-about San Diego startup that is meant to allow consumers to conduct their […]

A much buzzed-about San Diego startup that is meant to allow consumers to conduct their own molecular diagnostics at home just got a nice-sized funding round. Cue just raised a $7.5 million Series A led by Sherpa Ventures, with funding also coming from early angel investor Immortalana.

The sleek Cue device, for which the company is named, is still in testing and now detects and tracks five health and lifestyle indicators in mere minutes: Inflammation, vitamin D levels, fertility, testosterone and influenza.

The company also has a smartphone app called Life Feed that it says helps users visualize and quantify the daily effect of activity, food and sleep on these molecular readings as well as overall wellness.

“I see Cue as a unique approach to consumer health. I’m interested in working with companies that can offer services and commerce solutions quickly, and adapt to the mobile consumer. Cue is a prime example of the ‘on demand’ economy applied to health and wellness,” said Shervin Pishevar, managing director at Sherpa Ventures and a new Cue board member. “We exist at a moment where major companies in the tech space are entering the consumer health space, and I believe that Cue’s solution pushes the envelope and has enormous potential to change the way consumers interact with and understand their health.”

I spoke with Cue’s founders back in June about how the company was launched:

Ayub Khattak’s big idea started with the swine flu.

Sneezing, hacking and panicking would-be flu patients were lining up at doctors’ offices and emergency departments in 2009, worried they’d caught the bug that was causing an H1N1 pandemic. Diagnostic laboratories were swamped in the bum-rush to get tested for the virulent disease. Khattak — who worked in one of these labs at University of California, Los Angeles — thought there had to be a better way to address the consumer demand for flu testing. The idea, in essence, was to cut out the middle man — in this case, the doctor’s office.

“I thought — if people could find out if they had the flu or not at home, instead of the doctor’s office, it would be easier for them to take the steps they need to get better, faster,” Khattak said.

It was the inspiration for Cue, an at-home diagnostic device that enables users to determine whether they have the flu without a trip to the clinic.

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