A company building a suite of smartphone health tools is focusing its next phase of growth on the U.S. market.
Healthy.io recently announced new funding to accelerate U.S. adoption of its smartphone-powered kidney test.
Last week, the company announced it had completed a $50 million Series D round. The funding includes a previously undisclosed $45 million raise from February 2022 and a more recent $5 million investment. The Series D round was led by Schusterman Family Investments and was joined by Aleph and other existing shareholders.
The company was founded in 2013 in Tel Aviv, Israel, and also has locations in Boston and London.
Last July, Healthy.io’s Minuteful Kidney test was cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Healthy.io mails users urine test strips and the results are read using a smartphone camera. The test looks at a person’s albumin-to-creatinine ratio to try to gauge their risks of cardiovascular and kidney diseases.
The company said that in testing with more than 250,000 patients in the U.S. and U.K., the convenience of its at-home test led to “high adherence rates of up to 50% among previously untested populations.”
“By reducing barriers to essential diagnostic tests, Minuteful Kidney can reduce healthcare costs, create clinical value for providers and help prevent patients of all socioeconomic backgrounds avoid costly and disruptive kidney disease treatments,” Yonatan Adiri, CEO and founder of Healthy.io, said in a statement. “During these turbulent times, we are grateful to our investors for believing in our company, trusting our capabilities, and getting us one step closer to that goal.”
As the company prepares to ramp up expansion efforts in the U.S., it is also reducing its team size outside the states.
Last week, Calcalist reported that Healthy.io laid off 70 employees, or around a third of its workforce. The outlet said that most of the impacted employees were based in Israel and the UK. A spokesperson for Healthy.io declined to answer questions from BostInno regarding the layoffs.
In a statement, the company said that “since the next phase of our growth will focus on commercialization in the U.S and serving the millions of Americans who are untested for chronic kidney disease, we are readjusting our workforce in Israel and the UK to support this strategy.”
In addition to its urinalysis tests, Healthy.io also has rolled out a wound-management smartphone application. The Minuteful for Wound app uses a smartphone camera to help health care workers monitor the healing progress of wounds over time.
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