You could call it the Uber of phlebotomy. A Virginia company that draws blood on demand wherever patients are — at home, at work, or in their doctor’s office — just raised $13 million to expand and improve its technology, according to a company statement.
Iggbo, based in Richmond, Virginia, employs 8,000 phlebotomists to fan out across 120 cities in the U.S., collect patients’ blood, and dispatch it to 3,000 specialty laboratories for testing. The company has relationships with conventional and telemedicine providers, and also has offices in Cleveland and San Francisco.
Iggbo initially raised a total of $6 million in two rounds of fundraising. Heritage Group, a healthcare-exclusive, venture capital firm based in Nashville, Tennessee, led the $13 million Series A financing round. Iggbo will use the new funding to develop its technology (including voice recognition), hire more employees, and expand sales and marketing efforts with diagnostic laboratories, health systems, providers, retailers, and payers.
It sounds a little like Theranos, the ill-fated Silicon Valley blood-testing company that is under federal investigation and was just spurned by Walgreens. Iggbo doesn’t promise to perform multiple tests with a single drop of blood, like Theranos did with its proprietary Edison technology. But Theranos was counting on operating in-store testing facilities in addition to its own retail sites. An Iggbo spokesman declined to comment on any similarities to Theranos.
Iggbo co-founders Dr. Shaiv Kapadia, Mark Van Roekel, Nuno Valentine started developing the company’s on-demand technology in 2014 and opened for business last year, according to CEO Valentine. Providers can order Iggbo tests through electronic medical records, through a company Internet portal for laboratories, or even by summoning with the touch of a button an Iggbo phlebotomist who circulates through their office building, Valentine said. Patients and laboratories can access their own portals through the company website, Valentine said.
Iggbo aims to refine the process of drawing and testing blood, and to improve patient compliance with providers’ orders. About 30% of patients don’t follow through on those orders, according to a widely quoted 2008 study by the Imperial College of London.
The company continues to refine its processes so all of its phlebotomists know exactly what the company wants them to do, according to Valentine. He declined to explain the technology, citing intellectual property concerns.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“It’s just the enabler for the workflow and the processes and what needs to happen from both the phlebotomists’ perspective and the provider perspective,” Valentine said. “To have a network with consistent processes, workflows, labor that can be measured across the country is a tremendous thing to develop.”
Iggbo is not limiting itself to phlebotomy or even to the United States. The company has plans to expand into providing nurses and physical therapists on demand, and is close to starting operations in Europe, Valentine said.
“Our goal is to feel human, but yet be automated in some way and be able to scale the process so we use a lot of technologies,” he added. “For us it’s really the ability to create efficiencies in bringing advanced medicine really to everyone.”
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