Charlottesville medical data company Springbok Analytics has raised $3 million in an oversubscribed early seed round to scale the business in new areas.
The round was led by Chicago’s Transition Equity Partners but also included the NHL's Chicago Blackhawks, Sydney’s FSHD Global Research Foundation and previous investors Titletown Tech of Green Bay, Wisconsin; Charlottesville’s CAV Angels and early angel investors.
Springbok takes information from X-rays and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and turns the 2D information into a 3D model. The technology was invented at the University of Virginia by a team of researchers including Dr. Silvia Blemker, a biomedical engineer at UVa. and a Springbok co-founder.
“We are a classic technology story coming out of the university,” CEO and co-founder Scott Magargee said. “There were two or three researchers from UVa. who hit upon an approach that helped surgeons lengthen the tendons of people with cerebral palsy.”
Eventually, the researchers started working with athletes at the university and found other use cases for the technology. They realized athletic rehabilitation was important to student-athletes, and university’s sports programs embraced the technology.
“They did some early studies with some of the UVa. teams, and as the whole world is shifting toward this personalized training concept and precision medicine, they started to see that as an early-use case,” Magargee said. “Sports teams are adopting emerging technologies, maybe more than mainstream medicine.”
The company was spun out of the university in 2019 and has worked with professional sports teams including the NBA’s Chicago Bulls and the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles use the technology in rehabilitation after player injuries. The analytics and imaging can tell trainers whether the rehabilitation is working and ways to adjust a training regimen.
Magargee said the company has been good at attracting the attention of elite athletes but the new funding is designed to scale the business and move away from that market. He sees the company appealing to three major areas — human performance, aging and longevity, and research in life sciences.
“Our real challenge is moving this beyond elite sports and getting it into larger-scale adoption,” Magargee said. “We want to see it used by a lot of different demographics.”
The rehabilitation industry is fragmented, Magargee said, and he wants the company to form partnerships with major MRI manufacturing organizations. The company already has partnerships with the NFL and NBA, because these sports leagues seek cutting-edge medical technology.
Magargee foresees the technology being used in a similar fashion in a larger market. Right now, the technology can be used to compare one leg verses the other and see if both muscles are developing in a similar fashion during rehabilitation. A physical therapist can make adjustments based on comparing muscle volume in one leg versus the other. For an elite athlete that might be after a torn ligament, but it could be used after knee-replacement surgery for a senior.
“They can use that to adjust somebody’s rehab to make sure they are rehabbing properly,” Magargee said.
The company has 16 employees and expects to have 20 by the end of the year. Magargee declined to give revenue numbers but said the company’s “growth has been significant.” It had six full-time employees a year ago.
Magargee said the company’s advantage is that the science has already been proven. Unlike some life sciences technology, extensive research had been done on the platform before the company was founded.
The current round is not the first funding garnered by the company, but Magargee said this is the first diluted round. The company had previously gained grant funding from the National Science Foundation and a $1.7 million convertible note from the Titletown Tech.
