St. Louis-based diabetes treatment startup Aegis Digital Health is nearing $1 million in its latest funding round and seeing significant revenue growth as it helps practitioners overcome a challenge accessing patients' glucose data with Sweetspot, its software platform.
Practitioners have a problem monitoring their diabetes patients’ health metrics. Aegis CEO Stephen Von Rump said A1C, a blood test of hemoglobin chemically linked to sugar commonly used to clinically monitor diabetes, is a bad metric of care, as it can only be measured once every 90 days.
Devices like continuous glucose monitors, meanwhile, can provide significantly more and better-quality data for physicians than A1C — but practices can't easily see the data, as device manufacturers keep data in their portals. Practices have to go from patient's device to patient's device for proprietary reports in order to treat them.
"The people who are wearing these devices can see the data easily. It's right on the app on their phone. They can eat a meal and, 30 minutes later, look and see what it did to their blood sugar," Von Rump said. "Before SweetSpot, there was no easy way for a practice to access that data, so they don't. They don't use it. Here's all this incredible data out there that can really better inform care, and nobody's using it, because they don't have time to go dig for it."
Von Rump was an entrepreneur-in-residence at BioGenerator Ventures health technology investment fund and incubator (which has led the latest funding round alongside the Missouri Technology Corporation) when he met now-Chief Medical Officer Ralph Oiknine, an endocrinologist at St. Luke's Hospital. They founded Aegis after Oiknine told him about the problem.
SweetSpot, the solution, automates the entire process: gathering the data, centralizing it, summarizing 25 pages of reports through artificial intelligence. Practices can see all their patients' information on a single platform and see which ones are in highest need of attention.
Von Rump called Oiknine a "golden goose" customer by himself, requiring Aegis to do only a few months of customer discovery, though the technical solution necessitated a year of research. They began commercializing SweetSpot in early 2023 after piloting it at Oiknine's practice, Diabetes & Endocrinology Specialists in Chesterfield.
Revenue is currently $60,000 a month and growing, projected to reach $1 million a year by the end of 2024. Its customers are mostly private endocrinology practices, though Von Rump declined to name them. New clients, however, means SweetSpot is tracking 12,000 patients nationwide. Aegis, which operates from the Cortex Innovation Community, should be profitable by the end of next year, Von Rump said, as revenue growth and scaling continue.
"Until very recently, with our last couple of customer wins, all of our customers were private endocrinology practices, which is to say they are not part of any larger health care system," he said. "Private practices are a dying breed, but still, in the endocrinology world, there are quite a few private practices. But they are also getting bought up."
Akin to their situation, Von Rump doubts Aegis will ever go public as the acquisition space in digital health and remove monitoring is "very active right now," he said, adding, "At some point, we'll get to a revenue that will catch the attention of companies that buy things like us. I'm sure that will be our exit."
