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Komodo Health Seeks to Extend Its Reach With Nasdaq Deal
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By Brian Gormley, WSJ Pro
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Good day. Over its 11 years in operation, Komodo Health has built its business by selling software to enterprise customers like drugmakers, which use it for insights on what’s happening in the medical system.
Now, New York-based Komodo wants to draw more investment firms to its technology.
The thinking goes that this cohort could also benefit from Komodo’s nitty-gritty information on trends in health care. Komodo, which has raised $437 million in venture capital from investors such as Oak HC/FT and Andreessen Horowitz, amasses anonymized medical and pharmacy claims data. Its clients then use this information to see things like where patients are getting their care and what treatments they’re receiving.
Drug companies, for example, can use the technology to speed enrollment of patients in clinical trials and launch medicines more effectively, said Komodo co-founder and Chief Executive Dr. Arif Nathoo.
Komodo now aims to extend its reach into the financial-services sector through a new partnership with Nasdaq. The new Nasdaq Medical Claims Insights dataset includes information on topics such as prescriptions, specialty pharmaceuticals and electronic health and medical records. Nasdaq will sell access to this repository, which is enabled by Komodo data.
Venture investors can apply insights from this dataset when evaluating where opportunity lies for new medications, Nathoo said.
“These are the questions that early-stage investors are trying to answer as they’re evaluating the next generation of companies,” he added.
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And now on to the news...
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Dr. Gaurav Aggarwal, managing partner with Vivo Capital. PHOTO: VIVO CAPITAL.
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New fundraising. Vivo Capital, which has a nearly 30-year history of financing private healthcare companies, is expanding its public life-sciences investments through a new fund that closed on more than $740 million.
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Palo Alto, Calif.-based Vivo formed in 1996 and focused almost entirely on private companies in the healthcare industry for most of its history. But after having success in venture capital, and some public-market deals, Vivo raised its first fund for public investments in 2018. This latest public fund, its third, is about 50% larger than its 2022 predecessor, which came in just under $500 million, said Dr. Gaurav Aggarwal, a managing partner with the firm, which also makes investments in venture and private equity.
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Vivo says it invests in public companies with a venture-capital mindset, conducting extensive due diligence and helping management teams think about areas such as clinical-trial designs and business-development strategies. The firm, which targets small- and mid-cap biotech and life sciences companies, expects to make roughly 60 investments with the new public fund, Aggarwal said.
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Even though uncertainty is swirling around the pharmaceutical industry because of tariff threats, the team sees tailwinds to its strategy. A glut of biotechs went public from 2017 to 2021, and many of them now trade at low valuations because they are running short of money or have suffered setbacks. That creates an opportunity for investors to provide capital to fund companies’ clinical trials, said Managing Director Kevin Dai. “The decision to raise more than the last cycle was predicated on the fact that we see a lot of opportunity out there,” Aggarwal said.
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Hims & Hers Health Revenue Jumps, But Outlook Disappoints
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Hims & Hers Health first-quarter revenue more than doubled as subscribers rose 38%, while its second-quarter sales outlook missed Wall Street’s expectations, The Wall Street Journal reports. The telehealth-consultation platform on Monday posted a profit of $49.5 million, or 20 cents a share, compared with $11.1 million, or 5 cents a share, a year earlier. Analysts polled by FactSet expected 12 cents a share. Revenue more than doubled to $586 million from $278.2 million a year ago. Analysts polled by FactSet expected $538.6 million. The San Francisco-based company now has almost 2.4 million subscribers, up 38% from the year-ago period. Average monthly online
revenue per subscriber rose to $84 from $55. For the second quarter, the company expects revenue between $530 million to $550 million, compared with analyst expectations of $564.6 million. For the full year, the company maintained its previous guidance for sales of $2.3 billion to $2.4 billion. Analysts were looking for $2.33 billion.
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Funds
Deerfield Management closed its Deerfield Healthcare Innovations Fund III with more than $600 million in commitments.
People
Health plan provider Centivo appointed Sarah Fraser as chief financial officer. She was previously CFO at Capsule.
Deals
Shine Technologies is expanding its capabilities in nuclear medicine with an agreement to acquire the Spect business from Lantheus, a radiopharmaceutical-focused company.
Weave Communications, a customer experience and payments software platform for small and medium-size healthcare businesses, acquired TrueLark, an AI-powered front-desk automation platform serving healthcare, beauty and wellness businesses.
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NewLimit, a San Francisco-based startup developing treatments for age-related diseases, scored $130 million in Series B funding. Kleiner Perkins led the round, which included participation from Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and others.
Inductive Bio, a New York-based small molecule drug discovery platform, raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Obvious Ventures.
Koala Health, a Boston-based digital pet pharmacy startup, closed a $20 million Series B round led by Valspring Capital.
Carta Healthcare, a San Francisco-based clinical data abstraction and analytics startup, secured nearly $18.3 million in Series B1 financing led by UPMC Enterprises.
Paradigm Therapeutics, a Mt. Pleasant, S.C.-based startup developing a treatment for Epidermolysis Bullosa patients, picked up a $12.5 million investment from Eshelman Ventures.
Alphabiome, a Tel Aviv-based platform that transforms microbial genetic data into actionable insights for drug development, was seeded with an $8 million investment co-led by AIX Ventures and New Era Capital Partners.
Trilobio, a San Francisco-based developer of hardware and software enabling biologists to automate their research, raised $8 million in seed funding led by Initialized Capital.
Uviquity, a Raleigh, N.C.-based developer of photonic disinfection technologies, emerged from stealth with $6.6 million in seed funding led by Emerald Development Managers.
CueZen, a conversational AI health coach provider, secured $5 million in seed funding led by Point72 Ventures.
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Johnson & Johnson has plans to enlarge its U.S. footprint. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
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