A new healthcare data startup from two founders who met at genomics giant Foundation Medicine is launching today with the goal of using AI to take on some of the daunting challenges around medical data.
ScienceIO is emerging from stealth mode with $8 million in seed funding from investors including Section 32 and Sea Lane Ventures.
Its founders are CEO Will Manidis, a former Thiel Fellow researcher and investor; and COO Gaurav Kaushik, who was most recently associate director of data products and strategy at Foundation.
“We saw the challenges with gathering healthcare data first-hand,” said Kaushik in an interview. “We could do incredible things with healthcare data, like understand what patients had needs that were being undermet. But the hardest problem was just getting the data together in the first place.”
That’s where the company’s product comes in: a machine learning platform that's “purpose-built” for healthcare. Healthcare providers or other organizations will be able to access it via an app or API, which ScienceIO’s team says will help them capture the relevant data.
As an early step, the startup built a training dataset containing more than 26 million documents.
Manidis, who stumbled into working on healthcare technology after a serious illness in his teens, said a key goal of the company is meeting healthcare systems where they are today.
“You can’t be dismissive of any challenge,” he said, pointing to the online payment unicorn Stripe as a company that ScienceIO is aiming to emulate, with a “developer-centric” approach.
“It’s a really common thing for a technology company to come in and say ‘Look, we can tear this all up.’ We want to fit into what our users are already doing,” Manidis said.
The company is not yet disclosing its customers, but the founders say they’ve been working with several healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations.
ScienceIO is far from the only company working on healthcare data, but investors say it has a unique opportunity. Sea Lane investor Ling Wong said the startup is poised to “push boundaries and disrupt the narrative about what’s possible in healthcare.”
The company is planning to use the new funding to expand its engineering, product and commercial teams beyond the current 10 employees, and is launching an early access program for developers to use its API. Its plan is to launch commercially around the beginning of 2022.
ScienceIO is also adding Chuck Smolky, a veteran of Optum, Aetna and Health Fidelity, as chief commercial officer.
