Portland women’s health care startup Gabbi Inc raised $1 million from investors earlier this year with plans to not only hire but to capitalize on a pipeline of pilot programs with insurers and raise a full seed round in the next three to nine months.
The company is building a product to help women better understand their risks of breast cancer and then formulate action plans that can be taken to their health care provider. It also builds a network of women in the same risk population so they can support one another.
The company started from founder and CEO Kaitlin Christine’s own story of loss and delayed diagnosis. Her mother, for whom Gabbi is named, died of breast cancer in 2013. At age 22, when she saw similar symptoms in herself, Christine had to fight to get tests that found she carried the gene that increases her risk for breast cancer and treatment for the lumps she found. At 24, she decided to have a double mastectomy. While in surgery doctors found cancer.
She is upfront with her story and doesn’t want to see it happen to others. Christine’s background is business development and identifying processes for health systems in heredity cancer risk.
Gabbi is an artificial intelligence tool that asks women questions and then offers a risk assessment. The tool was built using existing risk models and adds expanded and weighted ethnic and age factors and other social determinants of health. Earlier this year, the startup ran a pilot with a national insurer that gave it access to 30 million datasets that covered 8 million people.
That pilot found the Gabbi tool to have 23% greater accuracy than existing models alone.
“We did a pilot and entered into procurement with them,” said Christine. “Soon we’ll have a paying customer and we have other pilots in the pipeline. We are looking for payers and employers who are interested in providing this to employees to do early pilots.”
The startup sells the product to insurance companies that then make it available to customers as part of a preventative health tool. Revenue will come from an annual member fee and a percentage of cost savings based on the prevention and early detection.
Investors in this round include StartUp Health, WR Hambrecht, OzoneX and angels including 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki and journalist-turned-investor Christina Farr. The funding will be used to bring on some part-time executives into full-time roles. Christine was also one of the few Portland-area women able to raise venture capital in the first quarter.
Right now Gabbi is focused on decreasing delayed diagnosis for breast cancer, but Christine sees the company as a broader tool and platform for women to take control of their health.
“I want women to say, ‘I will ask Gabbi,’” when faced with health care questions. “That we are the mother, sister, best friend who you trust backed by clinical efficacy. How we built the model we can apply it to other preventable cancers: colon, cervical, endometrial and ovarian.”
