Glooko, a digital health company that helps users unlock data from their glucose meter and wearables to better manage patients, has raised a Series B round led by Medtronic and Canaan Partners. The Social + Capital Partnership and Samsung’s venture investment arm also participated in the round. Glooko added Samsung as a strategic partner last year. Its app is compatible with several Samsung devices.
In response to e-mailed questions, Glooko Marketing Manager Vikram Singh said the company would use the fresh capital to add data from insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring systems to integrate personalized, predictive algorithms into its platform.
“As for hiring, we’ll grow our product development team and hire customer success managers to ensure we’re able to meet the high demand for Glooko we’re seeing from health systems and patients.”
Wende Hutton, general partner at Canaan Partners, will also take a seat on Glooko’s board of directors. She sees the company’s platform as a response to the ACA demands of improving patient care without increasing costs. “Companies that are able to offer unprecedented access to actionable patient information combined with intuitive mobile applications are poised to meet those demands,” she said.
The move demonstrates a growing interest by medical device giants like Medtronic to partner with digital health businesses to integrate data from their insulin pumps into care plans, a market in which it holds significant marketshare.
It brings the total raised by Glooko to date to $$27.5 million, according to data from CrunchBase. Last year the company raised about $7 million in a Series A.
By adding data from insulin pumps, continuous glucose monitoring systems and adding predictive algorithms into its platform, Glooko will bring more utility to patients who require intensive, day-to-day glucose management, and make it easier for healthcare providers to get a full picture of a patient’s health so they can proactively treat them, a company statement said.
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.
Last fall, Glooko launched MeterSync, a way to help patients sync data from more than 30 blood glucose monitors with their Apple or Android mobile device. The data is designed to be integrated into a clinician facing population management tool that could be used with an electronic medical record. It also collaborated with Joslin Diabetes Center on HypoMap last summer, a tool to aggregate data from wearable devices and diet to alert diabetics to the risk of experiencing a hypoglycemic attack and recommend ways to prevent that from happening.
