A San Francisco startup wants to improve the way chronic conditions are managed, and it has raised tens of millions of dollars to get started with an initial focus on autism.
Forta Health has garnered $55 million in funding through a Series A round led by Insight Partners, the company announced this week. Its investors also include Exor Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Trailmix Ventures, Tectonic Ventures, Gaingels, Asymmetric Capital Partners, Launch Bay Capital and the House Fund. The company didn't disclose its valuation.
Forta was founded in 2021 by CEO Ritankar Das, COO Jonathan Roberts and Chief Marketing Officer Christian Smith.
They wanted to improve the way autism care is provided, increase access to therapy and empower families with better at-home caregiving skills.
"Therapy intervention lasts for some amount of time, but the condition lasts a lifetime," Das told me. "And these families need lifetime help."
Forta provides families with 50 hours of virtual training for at-home autism care and also pairs them with trained clinical health care providers for support.
The company currently has more than 50 employees and hundreds of patients.
Forta also uses artificial intelligence to personalize its recommendations for each patient.
"We are not a fundamental AI research laboratory, but we're an applied AI research laboratory. What we're doing is we're taking the latest advances and adapting it," Das said. "As people are living longer, and are living these great lives, they need help with chronic conditions that are increasing."
Those chronic conditions include things like Alzheimer's, autism and pain, Das said.
"These are complex, multifaceted conditions that are not the same in people, right?" Das said. "We classify them as one thing, but really everyone is quite unique, and that's something that these machine learning models are good at. Discerning these differences and finding other individuals like you who might have benefited for a similar course of intervention."
Forta works with health insurance providers — including Cigna, Humana, Anthem, United Healthcare, Optum, Oscar, Kaiser, Aetna and Medicaid, according to its website — but costs to patients might vary depending on their specific plans and coverage.
At its core, Forta is about centering families in long-term care and health planning.
"It's actually better to have a more family-centered, human-centered approach. And we want to be part of that system and lead that," Das said. "Family caregiving is a broad trend that is absolutely essential, especially with an increasing aging population."
