Curisium, a Manhattan Beach, California-based startup, has raised $3.5 million in a seed round of funding from Green Bay Ventures, Sanofi Ventures, Flare Capital Partners and New Enterprise Associates.
Via email, CEO Peter Kim said the financing will be used to help the startup further build its team and add senior executives.
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“Under the hood, our platform is technically quite sophisticated and requires top-notch talent to solve tough, interesting problems in computer science and engineering,” he said.
Kim, who has held positions at Aetion and Roc Capital, also cofounded Curisium with Francis Lam. He noted that the impetus behind creating the company came from his observations of the world of healthcare.
“Ultimately, it stemmed from a profound frustration with the current healthcare ecosystem, and the realization that many of the problems in innovative contracting today are caused by the lack of a trusted, efficient platform for patient-centric contracting,” Kim said.
Curisium was created to solve that very conundrum. Its blockchain-based platform enables providers, payers and life science companies to contract with each other. Through Curisium, stakeholders can participate in value-based contracts at the individual patient level but maintain access to population-level data.
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Blockchain technology is an important component of the startup’s approach. For one, it’s an immutable source.
“We leverage blockchain for its ability to provide an irrefutable audit trail in a trustless manner,” Kim said. “The element of trust is particularly important in healthcare, where there is often deep-rooted mistrust among the participants.”
Curisium isn’t the only healthcare company relying on blockchain. As the hype around the technology grows, multiple startups have been drawn to it.
MintHealth, for example, recently revealed a self-sovereign personal health record built using blockchain technology. It allows patients to access their information and oversee permissions to it. The company also has payer-funded digital incentive tokens called vidamints, which patients receive when they partake in healthy behaviors and can use to pay for healthcare-related expenses.
Falls Church, Virginia-based Health Wizz‘s blockchain-based platform gives patients power over their information. They can view and download their data from hospitals, their primary care physician and others. Additionally, specific organizations can use cryptocurrency to incentivize patients to contribute their health data for research.
But Kim elaborated on what sets his startup apart from others in the space. The main difference, he said, is that Curisium is a contracting company.
“It may be tempting to consider ‘blockchain in healthcare’ as a single category,” he noted. “However, the reality is that healthcare is an enormous industry with multiple sub-verticals, with myriad ways in which blockchain technology could be applied.”
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