Particle Health
We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Particle Health.
We first backed the team last Spring, leading their seed round, and are excited to be able to continue our partnership with their Series A, led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Story Ventures, Zach Weinberg & Nat Turner from Flatiron Health, Vivek Garipalli from Clover Health, Elliot Cohen from Pillpack, and Sima Gandhi from Plaid.
This investment was born from a blog post (Healthcare - What We’re Looking For) authored by Lily Bernicker, where she explored the future of healthcare and what structural changes were needed in order to greatly improve our system. One of her key insights was the desperate need for greater access to data and interoperability.
The average person today receives more information on a daily basis than the average person received in a lifetime in 1900. In health alone, we can track our cholesterol, blood sugar, sleep cycles, resting heart rate, and diet, but what we do with all of this data is the challenge. And because of various controls and regulations, most health data is isolated and can’t be used holistically. This is a huge problem (and opportunity).
Much like what Plaid accomplished in the financial services space – aggregating, organizing, and making data more usable – we need a similar transformation in health data. Doing this will help us discover new therapeutics, deliver new treatments, and predict the outcomes of care.
We came to believe that interoperability is a prerequisite to exponential improvements in how we design, deliver, and pay for healthcare. It’s inevitable that people will demand the ability to share and better leverage their own health data.
We know this will be hard. There are technical and financial barriers to data-sharing that are decades in the making. Data is siloed, unstructured, inconsistent, and often closely guarded as a competitive advantage.
But we were optimistic that these challenges could be overcome when Lily and I met the founders of Particle Health – Troy and Dan.
Troy and Dan convinced us that the time when people would be in full control of their medical records – but not own the responsibility of collecting and managing it – was coming, and that they were building the best platform to do it. With technology that delivers clean and comprehensive data in minutes, as well as partnerships that give them the most complete coverage in the country, Particle Health is building the platform to power digital healthcare. In just two months of going live, they helped deliver over 500,000 medical records for clients and patients through their simple API.
We can’t wait for this next chapter as the Particle Health team rapidly expands access to secure and comprehensive health data, especially at a time when the world really needs it.