Baltimore digital health company emocha Health has closed a $6.2 million round of Series A funding and is looking to build on the momentum of a strong year of growth.
The oversubscribed round was led by Tennessee-based Claritas Health Ventures. Other participating investors included Healthworx, the innovation and investment arm of regional health insurer CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Kapor Capital and PTX Capital. Sebastian Seiguer, CEO of emocha, said his company will use the new funds to significantly grow its team and customer base, especially among health insurers and transplant centers, and build on the success it saw throughout 2020.
Emocha reported 300% revenue growth, attributed to increasing demand for its technology from health plans, health systems, life sciences organizations and employers. The company's tech platform is designed to increase "medication adherence" among patients with certain diseases or conditions that require strict or specific drug regimes through directly observed therapy, or DOT. The platform is now being used to support patients managing over 20 different conditions, with a primary focus on asthma, diabetes, tuberculosis and solid-organ transplant therapies.
In response to the global pandemic, emocha also launched a new service on its platform which allows for employers, health systems and educational institutions to monitor any potential Covid-19 symptoms or infections among their employees.
”After twelve months of tremendous expansion, we are at an inflection point,” Seiguer said in a statement. "Our new partners will enable us to help millions of infectious and chronic disease patients across the country take every dose of medication properly."
Theresa Sexton, managing partner of Claritas Health Ventures, will join emocha's board of directors following the funding deal.
Seiguer said a portion of the new round will be used to fund expansions of emocha's teams. Emocha employs about 55 people today. The company will be adding about 25 new positions, he said, including some in sales, marketing and engineering, and several clinical roles so that emocha users can remotely connect with knowledgeable nurses and pharmacists if they have some problem with their medication regimen.
The digital health company is aiming to address the challenge of medication non-adherence on large scale. It is a problem that researchers have determined results in about $300 billion in preventable hospitalizations per year. About 50% of medications are not taken as prescribed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which also estimates that non-adherence causes 30% to 50% of chronic disease treatment failures.
Emocha is previously backed by about $2 million in seed capital, and more than $4 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health, in addition to other federal support. The company's technology has been tested in several pilot studies to determine its effectiveness in helping patients with chronic conditions adhere to their treatment plans. It has been validated in nine peer-reviewed publications, all of which have shown the use of emocha's DOT platform helps patients achieve greater than 90% adherence to treatment.
The company has partnered with local health organizations, including Johns Hopkins and LifeBridge, to test and expand the scope of its tech. It currently works with CareFirst to serve the insurer's Maryland Medicaid members who have diabetes and asthma. Seiguer said he is proud that with this funding round, CareFirst has decided to be not only an emocha customer, but also an investor.
Armed with the data and validation from its various pilots, Seiguer said emocha is ready to "invest heavily" in growth and bringing on additional public health organizations and health insurers as customers.
