When Flatiron Health emerged in 2012 with a mission to improve oncology care, its founder predicted it would either be "a great success or a horrible failure." Now the Big Data startup is reportedly on the cusp of taking a major step towards the better of these two outcomes, with Fortune writing Google's ($GOOG) venture capital wing is leading a $100 million financing round.
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| Google's headquarters--Courtesy of Google |
Flatiron has established links to Google. The oncology startup's founders sold their last business to the search giant for $81 million. After leaving Google, the founders, Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner, set up Flatiron, began talking to physicians about the main bottlenecks in cancer care and created a Big Data platform to address some of the problems. The platform, OncologyCloud, aggregates clinical and financial data from electronic medical records and billing systems.
OncologyCloud is in beta with 25 cancer center partners serving 100,000 patients, and Flatiron is pitching it as a resource for life science companies. Flatiron has quietly run the private beta and grown its headcount to 30 people over the past year, but released very little information to the public. This could be about to change. Fortune reports Google Ventures--which contributed to an $8 million round in January 2013--is leading a $100 million Flatiron round.
Neither Flatiron nor Google responded to the Fortune story--which is based on quotes from anonymous sources--but the startup is certainly readying to share further details of its technology. Last month Flatiron published the first post on its corporate blog, giving a quick update on its progress and saying it is preparing to refresh its website and public content.
- read the Fortune story
- here's the blog post
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