Pharma, Health IT

Verana Health raises $30 million Series C round, appoints new CEO

Miki Kapoor replaces Doug Foster, who will continue as chief strategy officer of the San Francisco-based company.

By Alaric DeArment on July 31, 2018

Newly appointed Verana Health President and CEO Miki Kapoor

A company that provides clinical data for use in drug and device development has closed a new venture capital funding round.

Verana Health, based in San Francisco, said Tuesday that it had raised a $30 million Series C round led by Google venture capital arm GV, with existing investors Biomatics Capital, GE Ventures, Lagunita Biosciences and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers founder Brook Byers. In addition, the company hired Miki Kapoor as president and CEO. Kapoor previously worked as CEO of healthcare data company Tea Leaves Health, as president of Everyday Health and as head of IMS Health’s global payer/provider division. Former CEO Doug Foster will continue as chief strategy officer.

Verana, which previously operated as a mobile health company called DigiSight Technologies, plans to use the money from the capital raise to expand its platform and hire more employees. The platform combines data from electronic health records with analytics to support development of drugs and devices. The company’s initial focus has been on ophthalmology, including a relationship with the American Academy of Ophthalmology that enables it to collect information from the groups IRIS Registry, which it describes as the largest specialty-specific clinical database in medicine. The company plans further relationships with other medical societies as well.

The AAO and Verana, at the time still operating under the DigiSight name, announced their partnership in November 2017, which included AAO’s licensing of commercial applications of the IRIS Registry, whose name stands for Intelligent Research in Sight. Under the partnership, Verana would be able to build new analytic applications and user interfaces to enhance the registry and then market them to drug and device makers, health systems, payers and others. Launched in 2014, the registry’s database contains more than 41.2 million unique patients, representing 166.2 million visits.

Photo: Verana Health