Startups, Patient Engagement

Arthro Therapeutics raises $2.2M to support digital arthritis care

The company will use most of the new funding to build up its sales, business development and marketing operations, with the goal of fully entering the U.S. market by the second quarter of 2017.

Arthro Therapeutics, a Swedish startup developer of a mobile program for treating osteoarthritis and joint pain, has raised a $2.2 million seed round and will soon be ramping up its presence in the U.S. Sweet Capital, an investment fund started by the founders of Candy Crush creator King Digital Entertainment, led the investment.

To date, Malmo, Sweden-based Arthro — formerly known as Jojnts — has amassed $3.2 million in private equity. The company will use most of the new funding to build up its sales, business development and marketing operations.

Arthro’s product, Joint Academy, is a digital version of Better Management of Osteoarthritis, an arthritis management program known by its Swedish acronym, BOA.

In a study published in the JMIR Research Protocols earlier this year, Joint Academy proved to be as effective as the analog BOA in reducing osteoarthritis-related pain. But the digital version cost 70 percent less to administer and made clinicians 400 percent more productive, while also reducing the necessity of total joint replacement.

Arthro launched a small pilot in the U.S. in 2015, but delayed a full-scale launch here due in order to manage growth in Sweden, to translate more content into English and to make changes to satisfy HIPAA privacy and security requirements, CEO and Cofounder Jakob Dahlberg said via email. “The plan is to expand further into the US market Q2 next year,” he said.

In the two years since launching as Jojnts, Arthro has gained 40 percent of the private market and 10 percent of the publicly funded market for osteoarthritis treatment, according to Dahlberg. The company expects to follow the same B2B2C model in the U.S., selling its product through private and public health plans.

“The model would be similar in the U.S., where the patients would insert their insurance membership ID number and we would check if they are covered/eligible through that health plan,” Dahlberg wrote.

Arthro has integrated Joint Academy into Sweden’s national electronic health record. The U.S., of course, is not centralized, but Dahlberg said the company is interested in integrating with other EHRs through application programming interfaces.

“Since our product is very flexible, we can integrate our APIs into current platforms/health systems, not always forcing our customers to use our UI, but instead their own,” Dahlberg explained.

Photo: Arthro Therapeutics

Shares0
Shares0