Medical devices, wearables — we are all familiar with them. But are they linked in any way to the healthcare system and the databases that are supposed to keep us healthy? The answer in most cases is no, they are not. Vital, which is rebranding to “Junction”, provides a single API to integrate wearables and lab services, making lab testing easier and creating better healthcare outcomes. It’s now raised $18 million in a Series A funding round led by Creandum, a European VC.
A few other companies are attempting to link data and devices, such as Health Gorilla, which has raised $77.7 million to date, and Change Healthcare, which has raised $48 million.
Although born out of London, the now New York HQ’d Junction, thinks the future of healthcare is in the home not in the hospital, because so much of the data about our bodies is in biometrics and physiological data, most of which is and can be collected on wearables and other medical device in the home. And yet, these are rarely hooked up to actual healthcare systems.
Maitham Dib, Junction Founder and CEO (and former Babylon Health engineer), told TechCrunch over a call: “We started out with devices, building integrations for different medical devices. You have a widget that you embed into your app or your web app, and that allows any patient to share that basic device data with you. And we standardize all the data. Then we expanded into lab testing. So now, how we facilitate ordering labs in the US.”
Companies can use the API to connect to over 500 wearable and medical devices.
“We’ve got over 2 million devices connected on our platform today. And we’re on track to about a million lab tests this year as well. So it’s pie in the sky. A lot of people are actually using it,” said Dib.
Furthermore, the Junction platform allows companies to order lab tests across all 50 US states, and receive results from over 10+ labs, through both in-person and at-home-tests.
Junction may be onto something. Some 60% of U.S. adults have a chronic disease, which often means a great deal of home-monitoring devices, which care teams must devote hours to collecting data from, manually.
“Data is the bottleneck to unleashing the potential of new technologies like AI in healthcare,” said Sabina Wizander, Partner at Creandum in a statement. “So much of healthcare infrastructure is built on legacy systems and communicates using outdated methods like fax and pen and paper. Junction solves this problem by providing companies with healthcare infrastructure for lab testing and device data integration.”
Junction has now secured over 140 healthcare organizations as customers, including Found, Parsley Health, and Evidation
Also participating in this A-round is Y Combinator, Point Nine, and Amino Collective. Junctoin raised a Seed round with Point Nine Capital and YC three years ago.
Mike Butcher (M.B.E.) is Editor-at-large of TechCrunch. He has written for UK national newspapers and magazines and been named one of the most influential people in European technology by Wired UK. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, and DLD. He has interviewed Tony Blair, Dmitry Medvedev, Kevin Spacey, Lily Cole, Pavel Durov, Jimmy Wales, and many other tech leaders and celebrities. Mike is a regular broadcaster, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, CNBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg. He has also advised UK Prime Ministers and the Mayor of London on tech startup policy, as well as being a judge on The Apprentice UK. GQ magazine named him one of the 100 Most Connected Men in the UK. He is the co-founder of TheEuropas.com (Top 100 listing of European startups); and the non-profits Techfugees.com, TechVets.co, and Startup Coalition. He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2016 for services to the UK technology industry and journalism.
