Anil Sethi, the former health technology manager at Apple Inc., is selling the company he founded to fulfill a promise he made to his dying sister.
Invitae Corp. on Tuesday said it has agreed to pay about $325 million for Sethi's startup, Ciitizen Corp. Ciitizen's service helps patients collect and share their digital health records. San Francisco-based Invitae, which offers a genetics testing and data collection service, plans to build a centralized place on its site where customers will be able to view their genetics data and their health records from Ciitizen, it said in a press release announcing the deal.
"We believe combining Ciitizen's state-of-the-art, transparent and patient-consented platform with our technologies and services will accelerate our evolution into a genome information company that informs healthcare throughout one's life," Invitae CEO Sean George said in the news release. He continued: "Invitae views the acquisition of Ciitizen as an important part of its strategy to be the industry leader across the genetic testing, software and health information technology spaces."
Sethi quit his job at Apple four years ago to found Palo Alto-based Ciitizen in response to a promise he made to his sister, Tania, to help patients with cancer. Tania suffered and died from metastatic breast cancer that was initially misdiagnosed, according to Sethi. He designed his company to provide a way to help cancer patients like her overcome the barriers they often face in sharing their data between health care providers.
The sale of the company to Invitae will help him fulfill the promise he made to Tania, Sethi said in a blog post about the deal. Her experience illustrated the importance of being able to combine clinical and genetic records to create individualized treatments, he said.
"While she is no longer with us, her data, as is her wish, is advancing life-saving treatments through the many in-flight research studies powered by our community on the Ciitizen platform," he wrote in his blog post. "This partnership with Invitae brings us closer to that shared vision for patients, caregivers and the healthcare industry."
Invitae is rumored to be an acquisition target too
Invitae (NYSE:NVTA) plans to pay about $125 million in cash and some 7 million shares of stock — about $217 million worth at Tuesday price — for Ciitizen. It also plans to issue some $225 million worth of restricted shares to Ciitizen employees who join Invitae. The companies expect the deal, which both their boards have approved, to close next month.
Ciitizen had raised about $20 million in seed and Series A funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Section 32 and Verily Life Sciences, Alphabet Inc.'s life sciences research organization. The startup, which has about 90 employees, will remain based in Palo Alto.
Invitae has about 2,700 employees.
The deal follows news that Invitae itself was an acquisition target. Exact Sciences Corp. (Nasdaq:EXAS) had approached Invitae about a possible merger, Bloomberg reported last month. The companies weren't in active talks at the time, according to the report. If a deal were reached, Wisconsin-based Exact Sciences would likely pay for it entirely in stock and would pay only a slight premium for Invitae, Bloomberg reported.
Invitae stock rose less than 1% on Tuesday's news. It has dropped by about 28% in the year to date.
