Less than a year after raising seed funding from Milwaukee venture capital firm Gateway Capital Partners and relocating from Madison to Milwaukee, health data technology startup Geno.Me is ready to go to market.
Geno.Me is a data exchange platform that connects researchers with anonymized health data and pays consumers who opt to share their own medical and genomic records from sites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe. It celebrated its launch Wednesday evening with an event at Saint Kate - The Arts Hotel in downtown Milwaukee.
The startup, which is registered as Revise Inc., launched a beta version of its product with a few strategic partners in March and hopes those partners will convert to customers, Geno.Me founder and CEO Britt Gottschalk told Wisconsin Inno.
The company has a remote-first culture but will move into an office at the Eagleknit Innovation Hub in Walker's Point by early next year, Gottschalk said. It currently has seven employees, including five in Wisconsin and two in Kentucky and Virginia, she said.
Geno.Me's target customers include health systems, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and clinics, Gottschalk said.
On the consumer-facing side, users can sign up for free, upload their health data and then receive payment when researchers purchase their data for use in applications like pharmaceutical and treatment plan development.
In developing the researcher-facing portion of its platform, Geno.Me collaborated with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Gottschalk said. Geno.Me is also having its model clinically validated through another strategic partner, she said.
Geno.Me is not yet generating revenue but that's its goal now that the product is launched, Gottschalk said. It's also looking to grow its team, she said.
Longer term, Gottschalk envisions Geno.Me being a hub for health data, similar to the way in which San Francisco-based Plaid Inc. has built a data transfer network that powers digital financial products. Geno.Me is starting with health records and genetic records but could potentially integrate other types of health data, like information from wearable technology, she said.
