An innovative new medical startup in Romania helped doctors from three countries collaborate to treat Ukrainian cancer patients made refugees after Russia’s brutal invasion.

The “Tumor Board” project was initiated by doctors from the US, Romania and Moldova to provide life saving treatments for displaced Ukrainians with cancer.

A collaboration of Heal 21 Association and Blue Heron Foundation, the Board used a platform provided by Romanian startup Medicai to connect doctors, share medical files, and provide a platform to discuss treatment plans, as well as allow the patients to track their own progress.

Starting in April, imaging of the cancer patients from Ukraine was uploaded (those who had it) and the new imaging from Moldava were translated from Ukrainian to Romanian/English, and reports were prepared for each patient.

Medicai, which has raised €1.2M in venture funding to date, says its web based HIPAA-compliant platform hopes to become a sort of “Miro for health”, allowing healthcare professionals to collaborate over patient documents and records.

The problem Medicai is solving sounds familiar. For example, to this day, patients go into a $1 million MRI machine and – generally speaking – walk out with a CD disk with an image of their knee or some other part of their body. It’s just one example of how data can be siloed and how patients are usually locked into large, centralized systems. This means medical professionals can’t easily collaborate with specialists outside of their hospitals.

Established corporates selling these centralized systems include BoxDICOM, Ambra Health and amongst the startups there is EnvoyAI and Collective Minds Radiology (raised $6.7M), among others.

Medicai founder Mircea Popa’s journey in healthcare started in 2011 when, with a friend of his, he co-founded a company that is now called SkinVision, a skin cancer screening app that detects melanoma (skin cancer) through ML algorithms applied on images taken with smartphones. SkinVision reached 1.2 million downloads and raised a total of $15 million in total. Medicai Co-founder Alexandru Artimon (CTO) previously co-founded software company Atta Systems.

Popa told me via email: “One lesson we’ve learned lately about healthcare is that we desperately need flexibility. With the Tumor Board project we’ve shown that Medicai can set up infrastructure in a matter of days to provide access to expertise across 2 continents: US & Canada to Romania and Moldavia – and this was done in less than ideal conditions.”

“Through the Tumor Board project we were able to touch the lives of oncological patients that would have had no other option in seeking treatment and we’re really proud to be a part of that,” he added.

So far Medicai says it has reached 29 paying clinics/hospitals, with 2,434 doctors accounts and 1400 patients accounts. It’s also claimed a strategic partnership with Microsoft and pharmaceutical companies.

Investors to date include D Moonshots, Cleverage Venture Capital, Roca X and Gapminder VC.

Meanwhile the Tumor Board project continues. If there are the predicted four million Ukrainian refugees arriving in the coming months, there could be between 13,000 and 16,000 new patients with cancer per month arriving in countries bordering Ukraine.

The healthcare crisis – more evident now as summer heatwaves put pressure on hospitals – is resulting in a staffing boom. But healthcare professionals in Europe can end up with bad terms and pay due to the so many hiring agencies offering medical staff on short-term contracts.

As you can imagine, this means this area is ripe for startups to ‘platformize’ this problem, and we’ve have seen that with the appears of companies like Vivian Health, Lantum, Patchwork Health and Clipboard Health.

Another, emerging from Stockholm, Sweden, is Bemlo, a mainly Nordics-based marketplace for short-term staffing of nurses and doctors.

It’s now raised $3.3 million in a seed round backed by Y Combinator, Long Journey Ventures, Uncommon Capital, and a group of angel investors that include Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, BloomTech co-founder Austen Allred and Top executives from the Swedish digital health startup Kry. 

Benjamin Waye, CEO and co-founder of Bemlo said in a statement: “Healthcare professionals have long sought a transparent solution for sharing their own work experience at different employers with peers. Reviews and transparency haven´t been widely available in this space, until now. Healthcare professionals should be able to focus on patients and not have to worry about working conditions”.
 
Bemlo operates in Sweden, Norway and the UK, and is used by both healthcare professionals as well as healthcare staffing agencies. These then compare short-term staffing at medical facilityes, get salary information, contact employers, and find shifts that suit them.

Lee Jacobs, founder and General Partner at Long Journey Ventures added: “By providing a marketplace for short-term staffing that matches the right healthcare professionals with vacant short-term positions, Bemlo can support the current European healthcare labour shortage by filling the gaps.” 

Bemlo’s business model is that the agencies pay it to market themselves.

With the current labor shortage in healthcare, hiring a nurse or doctor can take up to 3 months. As hospitals and others start to use these new startups, the hope is that that time can rapidly start to shrink to only a few days or even less.

When it comes to video-based data, advances in computer vision have given a huge boost to the world of research, making the process of analyzing and drawing insights from moving images something that is scalable beyond the limits of a small team of humans.

A startup called Theator has been applying this concept to the world of healthcare: it’s using AI to “read” video captured during operations, to look for best practices but also to help identify key moments when an operation may have taken the wrong turn. Today, it is announcing $24 million in funding — a sign of how both the medical world is adapting and adopting advances in AI to improve its own work; and how investors are stepping up to bet on the opportunity ahead.

The funding is a significant extension to Theator’s Series A of $15.5 million from February 2021, bringing the total for the round to $39.5 million, and $42.5 million overall.

As with the earlier tranche, Insight Partners led this latest investment. Previous backers Blumberg Capital, Mayo Clinic, NFX, StageOne Ventures, iAngels, and former Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt also participating, alongside new backers iCON and Ariel Cohen, TripActions’ CEO and cofounder.

The valuation is not being disclosed, but the Series A is notable for another reason: bringing in a big strategic investor, in the form of the Mayo Clinic, which is working with Theator — based in Palo Alto with operations also in Israel — on using its video analytics tools. Other partners include the Canadian Association of General Surgeons and others that it’s not disclosing yet. In total, Theator’s library now has amassed 30,000 hours of anonymized video, with almost 1 billion analyzed frames.

The opportunity in the market that Theator is tackling is that in the world of surgery, there is a huge trove of video already being created, specifically by way of the camera probes that are used in non-invasive procedures.

Naturally, the main purpose for most of this video is for surgeons to be able to track what they are doing in real time. But Theator’s premise is that — tapped in an effective way — this video could be an invaluable resource to those doctors, the care providing establishments where they work, and potentially to the fields in which they’re working (that is, the wider network of other physicians working in the same areas as they are), if it could be examined and compared against similar procedures carried out elsewhere, and then matched up against outcomes.

That may sound like an insurmountable task on a human level: there is too much video, and the concept of parsing even some of it sounds too time-consuming to carry out. And it means something else, too: effectively, the best results have to date remained with those that are doing the best work already.

Or, as Dr Tamir Wolf, the CEO and co-founder of Theator noted (leaning on an age-old saying), “Too often, where you live determines if you live.”

“There is no real understanding of ground truths today,” he continued, despite the fact that there are tens of millions of hours of video created through visual guidance for different procedures. “None of that video is captured, stored or analyzed. You lose an understanding of what goes on in the operating room, and the best practices.
Being able to identify what best practices look like and then share them is what we aim to do.”

And that is where AI comes into the picture.

Wolf describes Theator’s platform as “surgical intelligence.” It takes many hours of footage and in real time can identify key moments in any procedure. So a six-hour pancreatic surgery leverages machine learning and computer vision to to structure the raw footage, compare that video to other video of the same procedures, and then match what is happening in the videos to outcomes from earlier procedures to hone in on key characteristics, and where things have diverged.

The data is then shared with individual physicians, teams, their institutions and so on to create better understanding for existing patients (to manage after-care better) and for future procedures.

Although a lot of people tend to focus on after-care and the complications that can arise there after what has been deemed a “successful” procedure otherwise, Dr Wolf contends that this is a common misconception, born in part out of the fact that there hasn’t been enough data and isight into the operation itself. Wolf notes that some hospitals have worse outcomes than others for what equally have been determined “successful” surgeries in that there were no real-time complications during the actual procedures. Why is that the case? “We don’t know,” he simply said.

Wolf’s founding of Theator actually came out of that very question, which he asked of himself as a doctor, but also as a friend and family member to patients. Specifically, he recalled how both his wife and a friend/colleague coincidentally had the same operation at the same time, but at different hospitals. Both technically went okay, but one had a much bigger problem longer term than the other. Trying to get to the bottom of that is what has in part motivated what his startup has been pursuing.

“Theator’s technology has proven to be the critical next step in surgical advancement,” said Brad Fiedler, VP at Insight Partners, in a statement. “Integrating AI and computer vision into the operating room improves surgical care and is transforming surgery for the better. We’re excited to double down on our investment, especially as Theator’s expertise in AI and computer vision is now enhancing patient outcomes across an ever-growing range of commercial partners.”

To date, Theator has been negotiating its deals with care providers — that is, hospitals and clinics where procedures are carried out — although you could imagine a scenario where insurance companies, individual doctors and maybe even patients will be wanting to access this kind of data to understand more about what is going on, and perhaps more importantly — a little like dash cams — to have a record of what is going on in the event that something goes wrong. This is not something that Theator is pursuing right now, but it’s an obvious opportunity.

Similarly, there is a whole world of procedures out there that it’s not currently tackling. He described minimally invasive procedures as “low hanging fruit” in this regard because these operations already use cameras and are capturing video. Over time, there are a number of other even more complicated procedures that you could imagine could benefit from a similar treatment.

At the same time, the market is still evolving. Not everyone wants this kind of scrutiny or believes that it can give an accurate picture of the full set of circumstances that go into any single operation or treatment of one individual over another. It focuses, so to speak, only on the aspects that the camera can capture.

However, that’s not to detract from what Theator’s tech can do: but as with all AI, there is a lot more that needs to be codified, no doubt, about how to use that intelligence in context.

In the meantime, “We’re slowly seeing a shift in the minds of surgeons and others in this ecosystem that there needs to be more transparency,” Wolf said. “Moving to competency-based insights is part of that.” That will see this tech potentially applied not just for operations and best practices for everyone but for training. “Video is going to be at the core of how surgeons are assessed to see if they can come out of residency and into full practice.”

The big news of the morning is that Amazon is buying One Medical, a previously venture-backed consumer healthcare company with a technology twist, in an all-cash deal worth $3.9 billion inclusive of debt. The announcement follows recent reporting that One Medical was in play.

Seeing One Medical taken off the table, then, is not a surprise, but Amazon being the acquiring entity is a bit more of a shock. What is the company getting for its billions, how does the buy fit into its overall business, and what does the deal mean for startups?

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Recall that Amazon has been making moves in the healthcare space for some time. Back in 2018, the AWS parent company bought PillPack, a consumer-focused online pharmacy, and it previously worked with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan to revamp American healthcare, though that effort fizzled.

A proposal put forward by European Union lawmakers in May, to establish a legal framework to make it easier to share electronic health records and other medical data — across borders and care institutions and with researchers and developers of innovative health products — should be revised to ensure citizens’ health data is stored locally, inside the European Economic Area (EEA), to avoid the risk of unlawful access, a joint opinion by two key EU data protection supervisory bodies has recommended.

That looks like wise council — given ongoing legal uncertainty clouding personal data exports to third countries, following major privacy rulings by the bloc’s top court since 2015.

“[Due] to the large quantity of electronic health data that would be processed, their highly sensitive nature, the risk of unlawful access and the necessity to fully ensure effective supervision by independent data protection authorities, [we] call on the European Parliament and on the Council to add to the Proposal a requirement to store the electronic health data in the EEA,” the two supervisors write in a summary of their joint opinion on the Commission’s European Health Data Space (EHDS) proposal.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), two EU bodies which advise on the interpretation and application of laws, adopted their 32-page joint opinion on the EHDS yesterday.

In it they make a series of other suggestions for tightening the draft regulation and clarifying the interplay with existing data protection laws, warning that the Commission’s first pass falls short on that front in a number of areas.

There is already extensive regulation of health data across Europe, both nationally and at Union level (where processing this type of sensitive data with user consent requires an explicit ask, per purpose). Simplifying the process of sharing this sensitive, ‘special category’ data is thus a key driver for the EHDS — with lawmakers talking up the potential for the continent if fragmentation can be banished and citizens’ health data more easily pooled, processed and reused for purposes such as research into diseases and drug discovery, or for innovative health tech (like AI diagnosis).

Homegrown European health tech startups, like telehealth platform Kry, have also weighed in with some supportive words for the EU’s plan.

But the introduction of a new legal framework that’s geared towards data sharing and reuse could have negative impacts on individual rights like privacy and data access if the legislation is not rigorously drawn.

The EDPB and EDPS opinion highlights a number of areas where the two bodies believe the EHDS risks creating legal inconsistencies; generating confusion for data subjects; and even undermining existing regulations — such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive — warning, for example, that it’s not clear how individual rights, like the GDPR’s right to rectification of personal, would be impacted by the framework (since the EHDS envisages not one data controller but multiple sources and recipients of personal data, at a national, EU and potentially even international level).

They are also unhappy about the proposal suggesting restricting data subjects’ right to information over so-called “secondary” uses of their health data — which the draft legislation envisages health data access bodies regulating via a data permit system.

“The EDPB and the EDPS underline that the right to information and the right to object are inextricably linked. By restricting the right to information under the GDPR, the EDPB and the EDPS are of the view that the Proposal may not achieve the objectives laid down in Article 1(2)(a) of the Proposal. In fact, the envisaged approach appears to undermine the rights of natural persons to privacy and to the protection of personal data, especially taking into account the very broad definition of secondary use and the minimum categories of electronic data for secondary use introduced by the Proposal, which is not only limited to scientific research but also includes other purposes, such as innovation,” they warn in the opinion.

“Given the wide scope of the rights and obligations set out in the Proposal with regard to the access, use and sharing of special categories of personal data as is the case for health data, general references to the GDPR and the EUDPR [data protection regulation] may not suffice. In this regard, the EDPB and the EDPS consider that there may be a risk of misinterpreting key provisions related to data protection which, in turn, may lead to a lowering of the level of protection currently granted to data subjects under the existing EU data protection legal framework (GDPR, EUDPR and ePrivacy Directive). Therefore, the EDPB and the EDPS consider further specifications necessary,” they add.

In an accompanying statement, EDPB chair, Andrea Jelinek, also warns: “The EU Health Data Space will involve the processing of large quantities of data which are of a highly sensitive nature. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that the rights of the EEA’s individuals are by no means undermined by this Proposal. The description of the rights in the Proposal is not consistent with the GDPR and there is a substantial risk of legal uncertainty for individuals who may not be able to distinguish between the two types of rights. We strongly urge the Commission to clarify the interplay of the different rights between the Proposal and the GDPR.”

Risks of ‘Quantified self’ data

The two data supervisors are also recommending that the proposed for a European Heath Data Space is revised to shrink the types of information in scope — to only include bona fide health data — advocating for the removal of a reference that would also draw in data from wellness and other consumer health/fitness apps (such as behavioral/lifestyle data) too, where it has been uploaded to a person’s electronic health record (EHR).

The pair argue that including such data would pose a major privacy risk for individuals, since such high dimension lifestyle/behavioral data could be used to make sensitive inferences about the data subjects linked to their health.

They also raise a further concern — warning that consumer-grade tech does not generate the same quality of data as professional health services and medical devices. Ergo, bundling it with robust health data could lead to other problematic and potentially discriminatory linkages being made.

“The EDPB and the EDPS are aware that the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated the use of medical devices, wellness applications or wearables amongst the general population. However, this kind of technology generates an enormous amount of data, often special categories of personal data, and can be highly invasive. More than tracking humans’ actions and decisions, it is now possible to track humans’ bodies, minds and emotions at a level that even humans themselves might not be able to do. These data can then be used to predict people’s actions and manipulate their behaviour, even at a group level,” they write in the opinion.

“Mandatory availability of electronic heath data generated by medical devices, wellness applications or other digital health applications for secondary use must be assessed against the rapid technological developments in mobile and wearable technology and the increasing popularity of ‘quantified self’ apps and devices, that allow people to register all kinds of aspects about their personality, mind, body, behavioural patterns and whereabouts,” they also recommend. “Clearly these types of data processing deserve significant attention, since it is not easy to recognize as the processing of health data by the concerned data subjects. However, at the same time this brings real privacy risks, especially in the case where such data are processed for additional purposes and/or combined with other data or transferred to third parties.

“These types of data processing may create specific risks, including the risk of unequal or unfair treatment based on data about a person’s assumed or actual health status derived, for example through profiling, of very intimate details concerning his/her private life, irrespective of whether these conclusions concerning his/her health status are accurate or not. In fact, those risks may also be linked to the reliability and accuracy of data generated by medical devices, wellness applications or other digital health applications. Against this background, the EDPB and the EDPS acknowledge that Article 33(3) attempts at delimiting which data generated by medical devices, wellness applications or other digital health applications shall be made available for secondary uses. However, the EDPB and the EDPS underline that it is still unclear either what kind of data fall under this category or who would assess its validity and quality once inserted by individuals in their own EHR pursuant to Articles 3(6).”

If EU lawmakers are set on maintaining such data in scope of the sharing framework, the pair recommend the proposal is amended to ensure individuals remain free to decide “if and which of their personal data generated by wellness application and other digital applications… shall be shared with other recipients and further processed for secondary uses”.

Any further processing must also clearly comply with data protection legislation, they stress, and there must also be “suitable mechanisms” put in place to ensure that data subjects’ choices are respected. (Which could be a warning against any moves to replicate adtech style ‘consent’ systems, which certainly get people’s data moving but have been found to breach the GDPR… )

“Health data generated by wellness applications and other digital health applications are not of the same quality as those generated by medical devices. Moreover, these applications generate an enormous amount of data, can be highly invasive and may reveal particularly sensitive information, such as religious orientation. Wellness applications and other digital health applications should therefore be excluded from being made available for secondary use,” said EDPS supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski in another supporting statement.

The two data supervisors go on to warn that the “success” of the EHDS will depend on what they summarize as “a robust legal basis for processing in line with EU data protection law, the establishment of a strong data governance mechanism and effective safeguards for the rights and interests of natural persons that are fully compliant with the GDPR” — which they emphasize must be accompanied by “sufficient assurances of a lawful, responsible, ethical management anchored in EU values, including respect for fundamental rights”.

“In this regard, the EDPB and the EDPS consider that the EHDS should serve as an example of transparency, effective accountability and proper balance between the interests of the individual data subjects and the shared interest of society as a whole,” they add.

The Commission was contacted for a response to the recommendations. At the time of writing it had not sent a reply.

Data strategy

The process of EU lawmaking typically loops in the European Parliament and Council, as co-legislators, who vote on and can amend Commission proposals — so there is an established path for addressing the two data supervisors’ concerns if there is consensus that the framework needs to be bolstered to protect fundamental rights.

The EHDS fits into an overarching strategy by the bloc’s lawmakers, set out by the Commission back in 2020, to boost data reuse for economic and societal gain.

Since then, the EU’s executive has been busy slotting in key regulatory planks, such as the Data Governance Act (introduced at the end of 2021, it was adopted by the co-legislators this year and entered into force on June 23); and the Data Act (proposed February 2022).

Internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, has suggested the data strategy will help Europe tip the scales away from US-dominated Big Tech — by putting enabling rules and infrastructure in place that will make the region “the most data-empowered continent in the world”, as he has put it.

However critics who blame the EU’s relative lack of homegrown tech giants on its penchant for high dimension regulation are unlikely to be won round to a ‘medicine’ of (yet) more rules delivering a winning innovation formula.

Time will tell which side is right — but the Commission is pressing on in the meanwhile.

The EHDS is the first of what it hopes will be a series of bespoke common “data spaces” to boost industrial data sharing and reuse and to encourage citizens to donate personal data for “altruistic” causes (like heath research or fighting climate change).

Its plan to spin up these spaces involves coming with dedicated rules and requirements for specific sectoral or topic-based information-sharing hubs — like the EHDS — in order to create conditions for “secure and privacy-preserving access and interoperability” via dedicated trusted infrastructure and processes — and thereby grease the pipes of data sharing for research and innovation. And for economic gain — with huge store being placed by lawmakers on improving access to data as a strategy to charge up development of Europe’s AI ecosystem.

Other data spaces the Commission has mooted include one for the region’s manufacturing industry, another for mobility and one for the EU’s green deal, to support the bloc’s decarbonization and emissions reduction goals.

The rapid adoption of the Data Governance Act suggests there’s broad backing among EU lawmakers for the data reuse strategy. Although certain sectoral/thematic data spaces rules — such as health — may generate more debate/dispute as commercial imperatives intersect with individual rights.

Health is certainly one of the most sensitive areas to encourage data sharing so it may seem an odd choice for the Commission to prioritize for the first common data space. However the COVID-19 pandemic has concentrated lawmakers’ minds on having smoother mechanisms for getting health data moving to be ready for the next emergency.

Since each data space will be accompanied by its own set of bespoke rules it will inevitably amp up compliance complexity for those wanting to tap in but the idea is the benefits will outweigh the administrative burden.

But, as the EDPB and EDPS are warning, the EU increasing the sprawl of digital regulation raises the risk of inconsistencies being introduced into its legal framework which could harm individual rights in areas like data protection as more rules overlap and/or get meshed together.

It could also create fresh legal uncertainties for business if regulatory requirements fail to line up. 

Security and privacy researcher, Lukasz Olejnik, who has worked on health tech policy in Europe, agrees this is a growing risk. “In the previous, and the next five years, policies towards technologies are constantly popping up. Their confluence and fusion may create additional risks: Of compliance, even lesser protections,” he tells TechCrunch.

“I don’t deny that digitisation of health data may help lower costs, perhaps even contribute in improving healthcare or even saving lives. But it also carries risks. Of misuse, of leaks, of theft. Such centralised ‘spaces’ could become a tempting point for cyberattacks,” he adds.

Kindly His’ at home semen test kit

Hormonal healthcare can be intimidating, since it touches on the most intimate parts of our lives. Kindly Health wants to make it accessible to more people, with a combination of at-home diagnostic tests (including semen tests and tests for polycystic ovary syndrome), telehealth consultations and supplements.

The Bangalore-based startup, which has ambitions to expand into global markets, announced today it has raised a $3.25 million seed round from investors including Y Combinator, Olive Tree, Soma, Goodwater and Gaingels.

Kindly Health has two product lines, KindlyHis and KindlyHers. KindlyHers will launch a PCOS predictive test that can help women diagnose and manage PCOS. It also sells routine lab work for PCOS profiles and STD diagnosis. KindlyHis’ sperm tests lets users take the test at home and then send it to a test center for diagnosis.

Kindly Health was founded in 2020 by Nilay Mehrotra, its CEO, and previously known as Janani.life. Mehrotra told TechCrunch that before taking part of Y Combinator’s winter 2022 cohort, Kindly Health was focused on fertility, specifically building a B2B tool for IVF clinics that would help them select the right embryo.

“But as we start to get a better understanding of the market and our customers, we realized the problem was indeed much bigger and we needed to focus on lifestyle disorders,” he said. “We realized that at-home semen testing and diagnostics had a much bigger use case than just fertility and we didn’t want to limit ourselves to that.”

Since launching a month ago, Mehrotra said revenue growth is trending at 30% month-over-month, and the company expects to reach $1 million in revenue at the end of the year.

Mehrotra says the market opportunity in India for lifestyle disorders, sexual performance and hormonal wellness is $8 billion, based on the startup’s findings that 130 million people in India spend about $60 on sexual wellness and performance products.

In the future, Kindly Health will also focus on more wellness categories, and expand its product portfolio to include eczema, psoriasis and gut health. Its goal is to acquire 130 million users, and it plans to launch an app within the next few months.

The founders of New Zealand-based Carepatron, a healthcare platform used by providers and patients, say they are passionate about solo practitioners and small health teams. With that in mind, they built Carepatron, which helps reduce the amount of administrative work that practices need to perform and also automatically reminds patients about appointments to reduce no-shows.

The company announced today it has raised $1.6 million NZD (about $980,000 USD) in pre-seed funding led by Blackbird. The funding will be used to hire for Carepatron’s global team and on product and growth. It has clients in 30 countries, including the United States, and markets in Europe and Asia Pacific.

Carepatron is used by practices ranging from a solo practitioner to teams of about 100. It says its clients save about eight hours of administrative work each week by helping them manage tasks like booking, rescheduling appointments, responding to emails and generating bills. It is now used by 700 health teams, with about two-thirds of its clients based in North America and Asia. More than half of Carepatron’s usage is on mobile devices.

Carepatron was founded in 2021 by David Pene and Jamie Frew. Both were inspired by their life experiences. Frew helped his family with their community hospital as a kid, while Pene’s partner is a doctor who works with small teams and practices.

Frew, Carepatron’s CEO, told TechCrunch that “David and I were frustrated by the lack of progress and innovation across the healthcare software sector, as we had personally seen the impact of poor tools on our partner’s mental health and medical practices. We bring everyone together in an ultra-secure app with the tools and information they need to achieve better health outcomes.”

The platform’s core products are scheduling and workflow, client records and documentation, and billing and payments. Frew says it can reduce costs by 74% for its clients by reducing the range of software subscriptions and tools they require from nine to two.

“Because we are community-driven, we can massively reduce the cost of our platform with an average subscription of $12 month per patient,” he said. He added that even though Carepatron is in its early stages, it is already generating revenue and has been growing its customer base consistently since launch.

The platform reduces patient no-shows through tools like scheduling automation, including smart reminders, online rescheduling and built-in video options.

In a prepared statement, Blackbird principal Phoebe Harrop said, “By allowing people to access the experts they need, Carepatron reduces the frictions associated with getting timely care. We are really excited to support Jamie and David on their journey to supercharge hundreds of thousands of health professionals around the world with lovable practice management software.”

Mental health startup Intellect’s ambitious goal is to be available across the Asia-Pacific, but ensure localized, culturally-competent care in each of the many markets it serves. Today it announced it has added $10 million to its war chest in a Series A extension led by Tiger Global, bringing the round’s total to $20 million. The first half of Series A was announced in January 2022.

Other investors in the extension round include new backers K3 Ventures, JAFCO Asia, Singtel Innov8 and PERSOL Holdings, with participation from returning investors Insignia Ventures Partners and HOF Capital.

Intellect describes this as “the largest venture round raised by any mental health company in Asia.” The capital brings Intellect’s total funding since the Y Combinator alum was founded in 2019 to $23 million, and will be used to launch commercially in more markets, expand its operations and build out its mental healthcare system.

Intellect’s coverage and self-guided programs are available in 15 languages. Though it has a consumer app, the company primarily takes a B2B2C model, with companies offering it as an employee benefit. Its clients include Merck, Philips, Foodpanda, Singtel, Shopee, Omnicom Media Group and abrdn. It currently serves 3 million users in more than 60 countries and has therapists and coaches based in 20 countries.

Founder and CEO Theodoric Chew told TechCrunch that it decided to raise an extension instead of moving onto a Series B because the company is in a strong position and making revenue. “With the current economic climate, we wanted to put it in a better position for the next two years and beyond, so we have a strong war chest and are not distracted.”

Intellect primarily sells to regional hubs with a lot of conglomerates and headquarters. For example, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and New Zealand are all core markets. Currently, most of its clients are from Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

Intellect’s platform has two components. The first is the tech product, which includes its self-guided programs and app. The second is its clinical team of coaches, therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists.

Chew said the company works with professionals in each market to ensure culturally competent care.

“That’s something we have thought very deeply about from day one,” he said. “Essentially, what makes sense for Intellect in each region. It’s about having a product that’s hyper-localized for each culture, each region and country as well. To give an example, when someone struggles in Thailand or in Hong Kong, it’s quite different from Singapore in terms of what stresses they have.”

Though Intellect is available in 15 languages, Chew emphasizes that its goal isn’t just to translate the same material.

“We work with providers in every market, clinicians, psychologists, a team, to make sure that we’re not just translating, but also have examples and scenarios for the local context, and that extends to its own network of providers as well,” he said. “So beyond the app the being localized in pretty much every country in APAC today, we have a whole network of local, native, on-the-ground professionals.”

When someone logs into Intellect for the first time, they are prompted by chat to speak with a provider. Chew said this is important because it results in the most user retainment. “The majority of people in Asia have never seen a professional therapist or coach, so this is a barrel of newness for them.”

The mental wellness tech space in Southeast Asia has grown rapidly over the past few years. A new examples include Meta-backed Ami, MindFi and Thoughtfull, plus a roster of startups focused on specific markets, like Ooca in Thailand or Naluri in Malaysia.

“It’s definitely great to see more and more players pushing and coming to this space,” said Chew. “For us, I think that means there is more awareness and push to expand the category. It’s a huge cultural shift and push that we’re building for. It’s not just going to be a zero sum game from the get-go.”

As for how Intellect differentiates, Chew said the main thing is aiming to be an end-to-end platform for mental health care, ranging from its self-guided programs to psychiatric care.

In a statement, Tiger Global partner Jay Chen said, “With its tech-empowered, end-to-end holistic approach, Intellect is poised to become a leader in offering access to mental healthcare across Asia. We are excited to partner with the Intellect team as it builds a flexible, responsive and modern system for a critical component of healthcare.”

Tebra, an operating system for independent healthcare providers, has raised more than $72 million in equity and debt funding, bumping to a valuation of more than $1 billion. Led by Golub Capital, this brings Tebra’s total raised to $137 million.

Tebra was formed through the merger of Kareo and PatientPop last year, two cloud-based software platforms for “clinical, financial and practice growth technology.” The new funding will allow Tebra to merge with other companies, grow its market share, launch a combined product line and initiate new branding for the company.

Tebra says it now serves more than 100,000 providers in the United States, who in total provide care to 85 million patients.

Dan Rodrigues, co-Founder and CEO of Tebra, told TechCrunch in an email that “the name Tebra originates from ‘vetebra,” symbolizing our role as the technology backbone for practice success. Just as individual vertebrae come together to support the human body, our complete operating system supports practices, providers and patients alike.”

He added that as healthcare becomes more consumer-based, patients’ expectations are changing, but this leads to provider burnout.

“Patients want the same seamless, digital experience from healthcare like they have in every other aspect of their lives,” he said. “Patients are paying more for their healthcare, spending more time searching for providers online and demanding convenient tools like online scheduling, telehealth and two-way messaging.”

He added that the pandemic has “hyper-accelerated” these expectations, but not all doctors have been able to keep pace. Independent practices can give patients the personalized care that they want, but struggle to keep on top of administrative and consumer expectations.

Tebra’s products include an app that connects patients with nearby healthcare providers. It also gives independent healthcare practices, including those in remote or rural areas, what it refers to as a “completely operating system for practice success.”

For example, its other features include Tebra Practice Growth, which helps with marketing and outreach to patients, plus healthcare-optimized websites, search engine marketing, reputation management and digital and social ads.

Care Delivery, meanwhile, increases the amount of time providers spend with patients by reducing documentation time and maximizing reimbursements. Patient Experience streamlines patient communication for needs like scheduling and payments, while Medical Billing lets providers enroll, submit, track and reconcile claims.

Rodrigues said the company previously identified NextGen Healthcare, Athenahealth, ZocDoc and Podium as Kareo and PatientPop’s competitors, but Tebra differentiates by combining fragmented software solutions into one platform.

In a prepared statement, Peter Fair, managing director of Golub Capital’s late stage lending team said, “We are delighted to be a long-standing financing partner to Tebra, supporting them through multiple growth phases, add-on acquisitions and new product development since 2017. Our mission is the uccess of our clients and being able to offer flexible solutions that meet the changing goals of their business.”

YuLife originally made a name for itself in its home market of the U.K. for its new approach to the provisioning of life insurance: yes, sell a policy that provides financial security to your people in the event of your death; but do so with a focus on improving the policyholder’s current life with wellness opportunities, and encourage use of that with gamification — a model that not only is aimed at benefitting the policyholders more, but increases engagement on the platform and provides a complementary revenue for YuLife, which offers deals on the wellness services.

Its idea took off — it is now used by more than 500 businesses, including Co-op, Del Monte, Jaguar Land Rover, Santander and CapitalOne, which in turn provide plans to their employees, one of three of whom engage on the app daily. On the heels of that, now the company is announcing that it has raised $120 million to expand the concept. Today, YuLife covers group life insurance, critical illness protection and income protection, but it is now rapidly expanding to new categories like dental and health, as well as financial services (pensions being one example of a category that has a strong affinity with life insurance), as well as to new markets like the U.S.

The funding, a Series C, is bringing a new strategic investor on board, Japan’s Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company, which is leading the round, along with participation from previous investors Creandum, LocalGlobe, Target Global, Latitude, Anthemis, OurCrowd, Notion, MMC and Eurazeo.

CEO and co-founder Sammy Rubin tells us that this latest fundraise values the company at $800 million. For some context on that figure, when YuLife more recently raised money before this — a Series B of $70 million in 2021 — it was valued at $346 million.

That is a decent jump considering the current climate. Many tech companies are finding it hard to raise rounds, and when they are doing so valuations are definitely getting buttoned down (and in a number of cases seeing down-rounds). And insuretech specifically is definitely not being spared: on the heels of a boom during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, insurance technology funding in Q1 2022 was 50% lower than a year ago, and Q2 is shaping up to be even slower, according to research from Dealroom.

Part of the reason for YuLife’s bump is that the company itself has continued to grow through the slowdown.

Rubin tells me that its customers — it sells only directly to organizations in a B2B model, who in turn provide life insurance their employees as part of larger benefits programs — have grown 4X in the last year (not as many as the year before, which was 10X, but still growing), with revenues up five-fold, and coverage now totaling $50 billion, versus $15 billion a year ago. Close to 50% of its customers are new to the platform, he said, and in doing so is expanding the scope of those that are considering it as a worthwhile benefit for their employees.

“These are companies that had never had life insurance before,” Rubin said, noting that they are attracted not just “by the whole life insurance benefit, but the holistic platform around it.”

That holistic platform is an interesting twist on the basic concept of what life insurance can be about.

The app is built by veterans of the gaming industry and is designed around the concept of different natural environments such as forest and mountains, which YuLife collectively terms its “Yuniverse.”

Within each of these environments, users are encouraged to walk, cycle, meditate and do other activities to get around their environments in a healthy way, while at the same time being able to compare their progress against other co-workers. As with a lot of gaming these days, is a degree of personalization in everyone’s experience: one person leaning into one activity over another seems to produce different subsequent scenarios.

Along with this, users are offered discounts on third-party products to further engage with the game within YuLife, which could include a subscription to meditation app Calm, FitBit and Garmin devices, and more. As users make their way through their worlds, they get rewards, in the form of something called YuCoins. The YuCoins can in turn be used to redeem vouchers from the likes of Amazon and Asos.

Group life insurance, Rubin said, is the company’s flagship product and accounts for over 80% of revenues. Its other products — currently critical illness, income protection and dental — account for the other 20%. Its revenues, he added, are attributed to the sale of insurance policies. “Our insurance policies are holistic and include the wellness element,” he said.

Wellness in itself is a massive opportunity — worth some $1.5 trillion in 2021 according to McKinsey estimates — and while you can see a strong affinity between how that might be oriented around a life insurance product, and indeed a health insurance product, it will be interesting to see how YuLife tailors the concept to other kinds of insurance, and to other products such as financial services. Rubin noted that right now one of the perks in the dental product is a free electric toothbrush for each new user (although users still have to pay to replace the heads).

In terms of the other way that YuLife could grow, Rubin added that it has “no plans” to become a D2C product, but to continue selling through companies. This continues to set it apart from the wider wave of insurtechs, which have largely disrupted the incumbent market by improving accessibility to getting insurance in the first place.

AIG, Met Life and Zurich are YuLife’s current underwriters in the U.K. and Rubin said the company is currently negotiating with underwriters and other partners for its U.S. launch. Dai-chi Life does have operations in the U.S. market — among other activities it owns Protective Life — but Rubin said the strategic element of this investment is not aimed at that, but rather a longer-term plan also to expand into Japan.

“Dai-ichi Life is committed to supporting companies that have a proven track record of changing people’s lives for the better, and YuLife does exactly that, by bringing tangible value to financial products to bolster individuals’ wellbeing,” said Toshiaki Sumino, director and managing executive officer at Dai-ichi Life Holdings, Inc., in a statement. “YuLife has immense potential to build on its achievements to date, and we are thrilled to invest and help propel YuLife towards its next steps and scale its global operations. YuLife shares our ethos of harnessing the latest trends in technology to make a genuine difference to the lives of those using financial products.”

Deep tech and D2C have very little in common, except Noah Kraft. The Doppler Labs founder, who first came into the spotlight in 2014 with the launch of a wireless earbuds company, is teaming up with his brother to start something brand new. Well, for clarity’s sake, the brother duo are actually disrupting something relatively ancient.

The idea for Wonderbelly, an FDA-regulated OTC antacid, came directly from Lucas Kraft, Noah’s brother. He suffered with bulimia at a younger age and, after spending nearly a decade struggling with gastric issues, doctors said the best way to deal with the fallout was to take antacids every day.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, stress levels were through the roof and there was a rise in demand for antacids.

Also in 2020, Zantac, one of the top antacids on the market, was recalled because a lab found that the name-brand drug and its generic equivalents contained a cancer-causing compound.

“I start seeing news reports that if you have Zantac, throw it out immediately,” said Lucas Kraft. “Of course, this doesn’t actually help my stress at all. So I start to scramble, grab my Tums, grab everything, and start looking at the back label. What else is in this stuff that I’m taking? I’m trying to lead a healthier lifestyle and I’ve successfully recovered from an eating disorder but I really I do want to stick by a lifestyle that I’m proud of.”

He realized that there were a handful of questionable ingredients in the Tums he took every single day. One was talc, a binding agent that doesn’t actually serve to relieve any pain or discomfort, but is an incredibly cheap way to get active ingredients where they’re going.

“I know what talc is because there’s a $30 billion lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson right now over a claim that talc causes cancer,” Lucas explained. “And they’re all these other ingredients — titanium dioxide, ammonium hydroxide. All of these things that weren’t the active ingredient and weren’t actually going to help my my symptoms, and if anything, they made me worried about what news stories would come out next.”

Lucas sat down with his brother Noah and they discussed the market opportunity here.

Wonderbelly was the answer.

Wonderbelly is an FDA-regulated over-the-counter product that is 100 percent plastic-free, and the company claims it uses healthier ingredients than Tums. Wonderbelly Antacid is non-GMO and vegan, and includes ingredients like calcium carbonate, vegetable cellulose, vegetable stearate, maize starch, sucrose and natural flavors.

Lucas and Noah didn’t build Wonderbelly all on their own. They surrounded themselves with a team of experts, including Sovereign Pharmaceutical veteral Johanna Hunter (now VP of Product and Manufacturing at Wonderbelly), as well as several top gastroenterologists as advisors.

The company launched to the public in June 2014 and has today announced the raise of a $3.375 million seed round led by SLOW, Brand Project and Elizabeth Street, with strategic investment from Luke Sherwin (Casper), Greg Sewitz and Gabi Lewis (Magic Spoon), Justin Gold (Justin’s Peanut Butter Cups) and Noah’s former partner in Doppler Labs Fritz Lanman.

In the first two weeks, Wonderbelly saw more than 1000 customers.

Wonderbelly – Let’s Kick Acid

For now, Wonderbelly is focused on building a strong D2C brand, but has every intention of infiltrating retail shelves. After all, antacids aren’t often purchased online. To build that strong online brand, Wonderbelly is aiming to not only play to the younger demographic with catchy copy (“Let’s Kick Acid”), but to build a community around digestive health issues in an open, honest way. Brands like Roman and Hims & Hers have seen tremendous success doing the same thing.

Antacids are just the beginning, according to the Krafts, with plans to get into other OTC medications in the future.

Indian fitness platform, Ultrahuman, is expanding its wearable portfolio by launching a smart ring to boost its ability to provide tech loving ‘biohackers’ — and, it hopes, health-concerned Boomers — with more insightful metabolic insights.

Sensors embedded in the forthcoming Ultrahuman Ring include temperature, heart rate and movement monitors, which enable the device to track the wearer’s sleep quality, stress levels and activity density, per CEO and co-founder, Mohit Kuma.

The device is designed to work in conjunction with the startup’s existing wearable, a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) sensor-based service it brands ‘Cyborg’, to deepen the quality of insights for users — such as by identifying when a poor glucose response might be linked to a bad night’s sleep, say, or elevated stress levels, rather than putting all the focus on whatever it was the user ate right before their blood sugar spiked.

The Ultrahuman Ring is not a CGM itself but it can function as a standalone health tracker, according to Kumar — giving the fitness startup a shot at broadening the appeal of its metabolic tracking service since the smart ring just slips on the finger, instead of, as is the case with the CGM, requiring that a spring-loaded filament is fired into the user’s upper arm (and left in place, ‘worn’ under the skin).

The clean, chunky look of the ring band (which comes in a shiny metal titanium or black finish) is also more likely to fit in with fashion-conscious consumers than rocking a ‘Cyborg’ arm patch. 

The Ultrahuman Ring goes up for pre-order today, with shipping slated to start in August.

At the time of writing pricing hasn’t been confirmed but the startup told us there will be two options: One (premium) price covering lifetime usage; and another (monthly) subscription option with a relatively small lock in period, after which the user would be free to quit on demand.

One ring to end the guesswork?

“The idea is to help you understand more about what are the additional factors in your metabolism,” say Kumar, discussing the incoming smart ring in a Zoom call with TechCrunch. “Right now today with the glucose monitor you actually understand the outcome of how glucose metabolism works but there are many other factors that affect glucose levels — factors like stress, sleep, activity. These are the major ones.”

“Today, a lot of this is actually guesswork,” he goes on. “But with our own wearable — and with the access to the raw data of the wearable — we actually have the ability now to understand what was the leading factor that led to a poorer glucose response. For example, if you’re under-recovered because of, let’s say, lack of sleep and the glucose levels get elevated the platform now can clearly figure out what is the contributing factor. And similarly for lack of activity.”

Many factors can affect how the body metabolises glucose, while big swings in blood sugar can be associated with health problems like diabetes and heart disease — creating an impetus for consumers to make lifestyle changes intended to stablize their glucose response, such as upping their activity level, choosing a healthier diet and getting enough sleep.

Ultrahuman’s metabolic fitness tracking service essentially sells real-time feedback to help individuals get a handle on what’s going on with their biology. But when we road-tested its beta product last year, we highlighted the relative challenge for the average user to intelligently interpret their glucose variability data — and link it to specific lifestyle factors — vs taking a too simplistic read of the data.

The smart ring looks intended to shrink this interpretation gap by enabling Ultrahuman’s platform to track and triangulate a variety of biomarkers to provide the user with a stronger read on what’s behind their glucose peaks and troughs. (Or: “If lack of activity is leading to elevated base levels of glucose the platform will be able to decode it in a much more efficient way,” as Kumar puts it.)

Ultrahuman will be going up against a number of more established players in the smart ring space — typically also with a strong focus on health/fitness tracking. However it argues its differentiating twist here is that it’s “optimizing for metabolism” — and, well, it has the glucose tracking data to back that up (thanks to early adopters of its CGM-based ‘Cyborg’ wearable).

“Different platforms optimize for different things. Oura, for example, optimize for sleep. Whoop provides for recovery. And here we’re optimizing for metabolism,” argues Kumar, adding that how Ultrahuman captures data (with “more real-time” sensors) is a distinctive technical element of its differentiation vs rival smart ring makers.

“The way we have built the data pointers, the frequency of data pointers, the type of metrics, real-time-ness of temperature etc, is more optimized towards the metabolism than other wearables,” he also suggests.

“For us temperature is a much more important biomarker given that we’re looking at the metabolic rate and glucose metabolism. So that was one of the reasons why we decided to build our own wearable — so that we have control over the accuracy of the insights and also the ability to derive some of these insights which was not possible with the existing class of wearables.”

According to Kumar, the Ultrahuman Ring measures stress by looking at factors like heart rate, HRV (heart rate variability) and temperature — running its own algorithmic analysis of the data to identify a per user stress response.

For activity, he says it’s aiming to identify “activity density” — by looking at input from accelerometers, as well as temperature and heart rate — to try to understand “what zone of activity were you in”.

The sleep tracking component also pulls data from activity sensors, temperature and heart rate — to identify different phases of sleep (REM, deep sleep etc). 

While sensor-laden, the Ultrahuman Ring is not currently configured to deliver direct feedback at the hardware level (such as by vibrations) — but Kumar suggests that haptic nudges and/or smart alarms are something it wants to add in future. 

Image credits: Ultrahuman

Two wearables for gut insights

Ultrahuman settled on a smart ring as its choice of form factor for this second wearable, rather than — say — a smart band, for a few reasons. Firstly, it avoids the risk of having to compete with existing wrist-mounted wearables (like the Apple Watch) for space on the user’s person. But Kumar also says its testing showed that a ring form factor yielded the lowest data variability of all the forms it tested for metrics like temperature, an important consideration for accuracy.

The team also judged that a ring stands a better chance of being worn more consistently and continuously than other types of wearables. (Ultrahuman’s Ring can survive getting wet in the shower or the pool, he confirms, with also up to five days of battery life before it needs to be charged.) “The more data that the user has about themselves, the more powerful the insights will be,” he adds.

If the ring user is simultaneously wearing Ultrahuman’s CGM too, insights picked up by the ring’s sensors will be directly linked to their real-time glucose levels (which the Cyborg sensor measures via changes to the interstitial fluid under the skin of their arm) — enabling actionable connections to be made between glucose variability and lifestyle events which may be triggers (high stress, poor sleep, low activity levels etc).

“Where our strength will be is in terms of marrying things like glucose variability and impact on your sleep,” he predicts. “Or, for example, if you have a late meal and a late glucose spike — what impact did it cause on your sleep?

“For some people this is perfectly fine — they can have a late glucose spike and they’ll actually pretty much be in the [target sleep] zone. But for a lot of people it actually affects their REM sleep pretty [badly]. And in some cases it affects their deep sleep also.”

The Ultrahuman smart ring plus Cyborg CGM combo could therefore power diet-related interventions for users who can’t avoid having a late meal but for whom its metabolic tracking has implicated glucose spikes as negatively affecting their sleep quality — by suggesting, for example, they opt for certain foods that are linked to improved sleep (such as tryptophan rich foods) when they have to have a late meal.

“Those are the insights where we will actually be pretty unique,” he suggests.

The product will also approach movement and activity recommendations in a distinct way to rival products, per Kumar.

“Movement is not just about burning more calories — it’s also about frontal lobe development, it’s also about longevity. And movement is an activity which helps people reduce cortisol levels and at the same time increase their [high calorie] expenditure. So a lot of our focus is going to be around movement — if you look at it from an activity tracking perspective.”

A user of Ultrahuman’s smart ring who has not tapped its upper-arm-mounted CGM sensor yet can still get some general benefits, according to Kumar. But he emphasizes that the greatest utility comes from the combination of the two wearables. “People will be able to understand their sleep quality, people will be able to understand their levels of stress recovery, movement etc. But if they want to understand the effect on their glucose metabolism of all these factors they have to unlock it by a CGM. So it works both ways,” he says.

The ring can also work to bridge service gaps inevitably affecting the Cyborg sensor — and thereby expand the utility of its CGM tracking service — by continuing to provide a prior Cyborg sensor user with personalized feedback after their sensor has expired. (The arm-mounted CGMs typically last two weeks before they have to be replaced — meaning the Cyborg service is interrupting unless a fresh sensor is applied — whereas the Ultrahuman Ring is designed to stick around for longer and won’t automatically ‘expire’ in the same way.)

“[If you just have the ring] the platform will understand, based on what sort of metabolic rate, your carb processing capabilities, how much you should be walking, for example, after a meal,” explains Kumar. “And that’s possible because now we understand what sort of activity levels led towards decreasing throughputs. So that’s how — over time — we actually don’t need your CGM data also, in many scenarios, to derive this output.”

Bringing biohacking to Boomers?

Since the ring form factor is obviously more accessible vs the (semi-invasive) arm-mounted CGM, Ultrahuman is expecting greater adoption of the smart ring than for the Cyborg tracker.

He says it currently has 25,000 people in India on the wait-list for the Cyborg service — which remains in a managed beta — but it’s expecting at least 100,000 people to buy into the smart ring over the next year.

Ultrahuman will be selling the smart ring globally — whereas availability of the Cyborg sensor remains limited to India and the UAE, owing to regulatory considerations and also its decision to focus on markets with high rates of metabolic disorders for the product to target — so the pool of potential buyers is larger.

At the same time, Kumar says the team is hoping the smart ring will be able to act as a broader marketing tool to cross-sell the CGM-powered service.

The typical profile of existing Cyborg users is an individual between 30-40 years old with a passion for fitness (and/or data analysis), and an interest in preventative health. But with the smart ring expected to have broader appeal, Ultrahuman now has its eye on convincing older, Baby Boomer generation consumers to take a punt on its metabolic health service — a wider population (of circa 25M-30M globally) that Kumar suggests hasn’t adopted a health wearable as yet. But maybe a shiny bit ‘o’ bling could be just the nudge they need…

“Maybe they have adopted a wearable like Apple Watch because it’s not just a wearable for health — it also does a bunch of things — but they haven’t gone deep into deep health or a biohacking wearable yet. So that’s what our target audience in the future would be — but the first audience is going to be biohackers, people who love data about their health,” he adds.