Biofourmis raises $100M to scale digital therapeutics

Health start-up Biofourmis, which leverages AI for personalised healthcare monitoring, has raised $100m from SoftBank.

SoftBank Group has led a $100m investment in Biofourmis, the health software start-up which uses AI to deliver personalised healthcare. Financing came from Vision Fund 2 and existing investors EDBI of Singapore, MassMutual Ventures, Openspace Ventures and Sequoia Capital also joined the Series C round [1].

Longevity.Technology: This further investment will allow Biofourmis to further develop its vision of moving “beyond the pill”. The company’s digital therapeutics solution will embed as a companion therapeutic to drugs, making an efficient model that will better treat and manage patients with complex chronic conditions, improving outcomes and reducing healthcare burdens. The new cash will also enable Biofourmis develop its portfolio, which includes digital therapeutics for pain and cancer.

Biofourmis’ wearable tech predicts problems for people with heart conditions and can raise the alarm about impending heart attacks days before they strike. It raised $35 million in its Series B round in May last year and in March, as the pandemic began its stranglehold on the world, Biofourmis were ahead of the curve.

Deploying hundreds of wearable sensors that detected the early symptoms of COVID-19 to people in Hong Kong, the company was able to leverage its cloud-based health tracking platform to try to halt the spread of the virus.

Six months later, although C19 is still a global problem, more than 100,000 C19 patients have used the Biofourmis system. The Biofourmis platform includes an armband sensor manufactured by Biovotion (a company which Biofourmis acquired last year) which is paired with a smartphone app for patients. The platform continually analyses the patient’s biomarkers, communicating signals to the patient’s doctor via an online dashboard.

Biofourmis CEO Kuldeep Singh Rajput (pictured) said: “COVID-19 is pushing remote monitoring and digital therapeutics to the forefront of medicine. Our vision is to use digital medicine to empower patients, clinicians and researchers everywhere by providing software-as-a-treatment for patients with unmet clinical needs, from post-acute care to optimal medication therapy.

“With this new funding, we will accelerate our global expansion, advance our digital therapeutics pipeline, develop additional care pathways and drive deeper integration with our health system, hospital, pharmaceutical and clinical research clients and partners [2].”

[1] https://prn.to/2QSSbgs
[2] https://bit.ly/2Fa73Vi

Image credit: Biofourmis