Prognos, a New York City-based artificial intelligence company, has wrapped up a $20.5 million Series C financing round.
The seven-year-old company utilizes AI to track and predict disease as early as possible in collaboration with payers, diagnostics and life sciences companies. Its Prognos Registry contains more than 13 billion medical records for 180 million patients. By leveraging its 1,000 algorithms, it seeks to improve treatment decision-making and overall quality of care.
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Investors in the latest round include Cigna, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, Hermed, Hikma Ventures, GIS Strategic Ventures, Maywic and Safeguard Scientifics.
“We have seen Prognos’ capabilities first-hand and believe health plans will greatly benefit from integrating real-time lab and diagnostics data intelligence to refine their approaches to risk adjustment, clinical quality and care management,” Craig Cimini, Cigna’s vice president of strategy and business development, said in a statement.
Not all of the companies are new investors to Prognos. In 2011, the startup raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Safeguard Scientific. In 2013, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund led a $15 million Series B with participation from Safeguard and MentorTech Ventures.
In a recent phone interview, Prognos cofounder and CEO Sundeep Bhan noted the significance of securing notable investors.
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“From a health plan perspective, it gives us an opportunity to have great partners that we can work with in developing new innovative solutions for that market,” he said.
He added that working with investors that have an international reach (such as Hikma) could be beneficial down the road.
“Today, we’re focused in the U.S. market only,” Bhan said. “But in the future, we believe there are great opportunities for us to expand internationally.” Having partners that have knowledge of such markets would be useful.
The Series C round will be put toward sales and marketing efforts, examining new markets and expanding the company’s AI capabilities.
Bhan described the funding as growth capital.
“We’ve been in the market already,” he said. “We already have good validation for value that we’re providing to our clients. A lot of it is really for our growth and expansion.”
He said Prognos currently has developed machine learning algorithms across 50 conditions, but is hoping to add another 20 to 30 areas.
2017 has been a busy year for the New York City company. Previously known as Medivo, it rebranded itself as Prognos in January. As part of the relaunch, it decided to make a push into the payer market to augment its predictive analytics work with life sciences and diagnostics clients.
Photo: John Lund, Getty Images
