Twine Health, a four-year-old spinoff of the MIT Media Lab, announced a Series A1 investment of $1.5 million led by Qiming Venture Partners USA. The financing will be used to fuel the company’s further development of its unique AI-powered health coaching platform, continued market expansion in the US, and early international sales, including in China. Qiming Venture Partners USA Managing Partner Mark McDade has joined Twine Health’s board of directors. Twine has received $8.3 million in venture funding to date including investment from Khosla Ventures, Provenance Venture Partners, and Neoteny Labs.
“We selected Twine Health after evaluating dozens of companies in the digital healthcare space, because this is a team and technology with the potential to disrupt how employers and workplace health providers provide employee benefits,” said McDade. “In a global healthcare environment desperately searching for better models of care, Twine Health is a triple win for workplace health providers, employers, and employees.”
“Partnering with Qiming and Mark McDade leverages the deep industry experience of their team and also access to their global network,” said Frank Moss, co-founder and chairman at Twine Health. “This relationship is a key part of our strategy as we seek to translate our technology leadership and early customer success into accelerated market growth in 2018 and beyond.”
Twine Health’s SaaS platform is being used by 56 workplace health providers and healthcare delivery systems, such as Activate Healthcare and St. Luke’s Health Partners, and helps hundreds of thousands of employees daily. The platform combines an easy-to-use self-management app for employees to use in the context of their daily lives, and a centralized console enabling coaches to deliver high-impact personalized services that only a human can provide. This triples the number of employees a health coach can typically handle.
Unlike most services for health behavior change that focus on a single condition at a time, Twine’s platform covers all major chronic conditions for employees with comorbidities. It also encompasses the entire spectrum of care - diet, exercise, medication adherence and more - required to control these conditions in the long run. The results have led to unprecedented published health outcomes for conditions like hypertension and diabetes as well as significant economic savings for both workplace health providers and employers.
The Twine team has been developing innovative approaches to health behavior change for the past 10 years, beginning at the MIT Media Lab, where Moss was director and John Moore, CEO and co-founder of Twine, was a PhD candidate in Moss’s research group. This expertise has been distilled into a commercial platform designed from the ground up to maximize employee empowerment and collaboration with care teams. Twine partners with workplace health providers to realize dramatic improvements in the most important factors in successful healthcare delivery: enrollment, engagement, and behavior change. Twine calls this process “employee health activation.”
About Twine Health
Twine's vision is that by fundamentally transforming the experience of healthcare delivery it is possible to radically improve outcomes and costs. Its AI-powered health coaching platform enables human coaches to activate individuals in sustainable health behavior change at scales previously thought impossible. Working with leading healthcare delivery organizations and workplace health providers across a variety of conditions, such as hypertension and diabetes, we have demonstrated that this approach leads to extraordinary results: approximately three times better outcomes at one third the cost of standard chronic disease care. For more, visit http://www.twinehealth.com.
About Qiming
The Qiming U.S. Healthcare Fund, LP is a new US healthcare venture fund headquartered in Seattle, WA with offices in Palo Alto, CA and Cambridge, MA. As part of a broader family of Qiming venture funds, this new fund seeks to invest in US-based private human healthcare companies with potential market opportunities in China. Focused areas of interest are bio-therapeutics, medtech and digital health technologies, with equity investments of up to $12 million.
