Three years ago, technology startup Biofourmis had raised $10 million in total funding. This week, the virtual care and digital medicine-focused company announced a massive $300 million cash injection to fuel its growth.
The funding round has boosted Biofourmis' valuation to more than $1 billion, according to executives.
The series D investment was led by leading global growth equity firm General Atlantic. CVS Health and existing investors also participated in the round.
Biofourmis has raised a total of $445 million in funding. Existing investors include SoftBank Vision Fund 2, which led Biofourmis’ $100 million series C announced in September 2020, Openspace Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Sequoia Capital and EDBI.
"We're really focusing on doubling down on our organic growth strategy, we have a pretty solid organic growth strategy plan," Biofourmis CEO Kuldeep Singh Rajput told Fierce Healthcare. "With the two parts of our business, therapeutics and care at home, we will continue to accelerate commercialization and penetration into the market, scaling up the number of customers we have across pharma and health systems."
The Boston-based digital therapeutics company combines AI-based data analytics and biosensors to monitor the progress of medical treatment.
Biofourmis plans to scale up its virtual care offerings. This includes delivering personalized and predictive care-at-home to a growing number of acutely ill patients and post-acute care following hospital discharge. Earlier this year the company expanded its artificial intelligence-based virtual care service to monitor complex chronic conditions. The new specialty virtual care program, called Biofourmis Care, will initially focus on heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, lipid management and atrial fibrillation. The company's platform now spans the entire care continuum with a hospital at home program for acute conditions, remote patient management for post-discharge care and now, virtual specialty care for longitudinal chronic disease management, according to the company.
The company also plans to use the fresh capital to fund additional clinical trials to advance the development of digital therapies that work in conjunction with high-value drugs to improve efficacy, while forming strategic partnerships with digital health and virtual-first care companies, Rajput said.
Through these relationships, Biofourmis plans to accelerate the growth of its virtual care solution, known as Care at Home, which enables providers and payers to remotely manage patients across the entire care continuum.
The company also is eyeing potential M&A deals to expand into the payer market as well as technology companies with unique capabilities to target particular conditions like cardiology, he said.
"And if there are companies who provide virtual care and have much better penetration into health systems, we will be interested in those so that we can jointly you know acquire a majority of the market," Rajput noted.
The hefty investment in Biofourmis comes as recent reports indicate that health tech funding, mega-round funding and unicorn valuations are down. Biofourmis’ recent mega-round demonstrates that technologies with clinical validation, a strong customer base and prospects and business strategy, and demonstrated clinical and financial return on investment can buck the recent funding trends, executives said.
"Our position has always been to build the platform in such a way that it spans across the continuum, everything from acute to post-acute to long-term chronic care. We haven't seen anyone else having one single platform that can manage the patients longitudinally across the continuum," Rajput said. "But to be in this marketplace, we have to go beyond technology because if you're just putting technology in the hands of clinicians that adoption is going to suffer. That's what we spent our efforts doing last year is building our entire operations capabilities, our customer service capabilities and providing round-the-clock technical support compliance management."
Biofourmis is focused on moving from just being a technology company to becoming a "tech-enabled care delivery company that co-manages the patients and even move towards value-based care," he said.
"A lot of technology companies are trying to do bits and pieces but I think our differentiated technology platform, along with our services and our care model, sets us apart."
Biofourmis also announced that former Medtronic CEO and Chairperson at Intel Dr. Omar Ishrak will join the company’s Board of Directors as Chairman.