Less than one year has passed since a $760,000, Mark Cuban-backed seed round put Validic on the map, but the firm and its health data aggregation platform have come a long way in the intervening months. And with Validic's scale and ambition growing, the company has raised $5 million in first round funding.
Greycroft Partners and SJF Ventures co-led the round, to which some of Validic's early investors also contributed. The investors were all attracted by Validic's attempt to pull together data from the ecosystem of mHealth devices, wearables and any other piece of health-tracking equipment. By gathering all this information on one platform, Validic hopes to help pharma companies generate more, high-quality data in clinical trials. Validic is also pitching at hospitals, payers and other groups.
Having gained some traction with these client groups, Validic has raised cash to support what it has built over the past year. "We started out March of 2013, with very few users. We're now deployed to 72 million lives in 7 countries. That's significant infrastructure, significant staff costs, sales support, organization, to be able to keep up with demand. It's just been crazy and we needed some investment to fuel that growth," Validic CEO Ryan Beckland told MobiHealthNews.
While Apple ($AAPL), Google ($GOOG) and others are moving into health data aggregation, Beckland views their offerings as being focused on consumers, unlike Validic, which is targeting businesses. The difference is driving some of Validic's expansion plans, which include the integration of data from clinical devices that lack a companion mobile app. "Our focus going forward is very clearly on clinical data and clinical devices. We're going to see a lot of that in the next year," Beckland said.
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