Startups, Health Tech

With new funding, digital physical therapy startup Kaia strikes partnerships with clinicians  

Kaia Health, a startup providing app-based programs for musculoskeletal conditions and COPD, recently raised $75 million in funding. As competitors look to round out their platforms with other services, Kaia is looking to strike partnerships with clinicians. 

As competitors round out their own services, digital physical therapy startup Kaia Health is turning to partnerships with healthcare providers to help manage sore knees, achy backs and chronic pain.

The startup taps into users’ cell phone camera to guide them through physical therapy exercises and gives them feedback on if they’re doing them correctly. More recently, it began offering exercises for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a serious lung condition.

In a bid for companies’ attention, digital health startups have been adding more services — including physical therapy — to address employees’ health needs. For example, Omada Health, which focuses on diabetes and hypertension management, has added programs for mindfulness and virtual physical therapy. Meanwhile, competitor Hinge Health passed a $3 billion valuation, and recently struck a partnership with a Centers of Excellence platform to help guide users’ care downstream.

As Kaia Health carves out its own space in an increasingly competitive arena, it’s looking to team up with clinicians to help address other care needs, such as mental health care or x-rays.

The partnerships are also meant to address some of founder and CEO Konstantin Mehl’s own frustrations when he experienced chronic pain, wondering if his physical therapist and primary care physician were working together.

“It drove me nuts, when the pain got worse, this mix of chaotic treatments I’m doing in a random parallel way,” he said in a Zoom interview.

Kaia recently raised $75 million in funding, a little less than a year after it got $26 million.  An unnamed growth equity fund led the series C investment, with participation from Kaia’s previous investors, some of which include Optum Ventures, 3VC and Eurazeo.

To date, Kaia has rounded up a little over $125 million. The startup, which has offices in Munich and New York, plans to use the funds to build out its commercial team and build out this clinical integration.

It’s no secret that companies have become more receptive to virtual treatments in the last year, as more people worked from home or postponed in-person appointments. While before, maybe a fifth of health plans were interested in offering digital therapeutics, Mehl said, Kaia has seen its business grow 600% during the pandemic to cover 60 million lives.

“I think in general it’s not a big news that during Covid, treatments for chronic conditions were considered elective treatments and it was pretty hard to access those as a patient,” he said. “Employers and health plans were scared that there would be this huge backlog of chronic disease patients who need treatments like surgeries.”

Currently, in the U.S., most people access Kaia through their health plan, while in Germany, it’s prescribed as a digital therapeutic. Kaia is building out a case review team of healthcare professionals that can refer patients out to other healthcare providers as needed.

Those clinicians, which Kaia refers to as “premium partners,” will have access to a dashboard and be able to review patients’ therapy data. To start, Kaia is looking to integrate its solution with other care services that would surround physical therapy, such as primary care physicians, neurologists, psychiatrists and orthopedic surgeons.

“Optimizing that is really interesting because it increases patient trust in our platform. We don’t pretend we can do everything,” Mehl said.

In the longer-term, Kaia plans to build on its computer vision technology, which it uses to give people feedback while they’re doing physical therapy exercises. Mehl also sees an opportunity to use it as a biomarker, such as to measure flexibility.

“We’re at the beginning of exploring the actionability of that data,” he said.

Photo credit: mixetto, Getty Images

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