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Big Data Startup NGDATA Raises $3.3M For Lily, Its Real-Time Customer Offer Generator
Belgium-based big data startup NGDATA, which also has offices in New York and San Francisco, has closed a $3.3 million funding round, led by Capricorn Venture Partners. Existing investors also participated, including Sniper Investments and unnamed angel investors. The new funding brings NGDATA’s total raised to date to $5.8 million, after a $2.5 million round last October.
NGDATA’s flagship product is a customer intelligence offering called Lily which it sells in to enterprises so they can aggregate multiple customers data-points to target marketing at individual users and personalise offers to drive more sales.
For example, the system can be used to recommend which offers (such as coupons) to push to a mobile user — based on their real-time location, say. Or send relevant offers like an umbrella coupon if it’s raining. Other examples of data Lily looks at includes group/peer behaviour and users’ past shopping preferences.
Big data — as a term — can come across as impenetrable and dull but it’s algorithms like this that are going to be powering our ambient info-packed future. Here’s how NGDATA itself describes Lily:
Lily uses powerful machine learning engine to provide consumer-oriented enterprises with actionable insights gleaned from billions of unstructured and structured items stored in internal databases, operations systems, POS systems, social media sites, mobile traffic and web video sites. Lily allows companies to create timely, impactful and highly personalized online and mobile campaigns that reach the right consumer at the right time, with the right offers. Lily is built on Apache Hadoop and HBase technology and integrates with an existing IT infrastructure.
Channels that Lily can tap up include data contained in subscriber databases and CRM systems; behavioural and transactional data including calls, texts, payments, iDTV, credit card transactions; contextual data such as weather, geo-location, or “inferable context” such as social sentiment or network data; logs from online and mobile applications; third party data such as socio-demographic data; and social media data.
Using all the data it continually gathers (via the channels it listens in on), the system builds detailed customer profiles for each customer. It then applies machine-learning to determine an individual preference score for each available offer — the scores are then used to personalize offers, either online and on mobile devices. The targeted data can also be served to traditional marketing (campaign platforms) through APIs.
NGDATA said it will use the new funding for continued product development on Lily, and also to bolster the business momentum it’s achieved over the past 12 months. The startup has expanded its global footprint over the past year, opening multiple offices in the U.S. and entering into a series of strategic partnerships with companies including Clear2Pay and Cloudera. In the latter instance, NGDATA said it has developed “sophisticated indexing capabilities” for Cloudera Search, aka “full-text, interactive search and scalable indexing to Apache Hadoop”.
NGDATA is not currently breaking out customer numbers but claims to have seen “significant traction” in industries including financial services, telecom and media/publishing over the past year. De Persgroep, France Telecom, KBC, Orange and Telenet are among the customers it has named. It lists its main competitors as Datameer, Wibidata, Spire, SAS and Teradata.
Commenting on the funding round in a statement, Katrin Geyskens, Partner at Capricorn Venture Partners, said: “We’re seeing a shift in the Big Data market, where companies are looking for better ways to capture and analyze data in ways that help them solve real business problems.
“NGDATA brings a unique and effective offering in its Big Data solutions, providing companies with the ability to gain deeper insights into their data — and its growing customer base and revenue streams are testament. We’re thrilled to join NGDATA’s team as the company moves into its next phase of growth and expansion in the U.S.”
As part of its latest funding, NGDATA is adding three new board members to help steer its strategic direction, as well as naming three members to a newly formed NGDATA Advisory Board. William J. Pade, personal investor and partner at Oak Hill Capital Partners; Michael Patsalos-Fox, former senior partner for McKinsey & Company; and Katrin Geyskens, Partner at Capricorn Venture Partners, all join NGDATA’s board.
While Guy Weyns, managing director at Paradigm Capital Investments; Jean Francois Van Kerckhove, vice president of mergers, acquisitions and business development at eBay; and Doug Cutting, chief architect at Cloudera and founder of Hadoop, were named as strategic members of the NGDATA Advisory board.
TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear contributed to this article
Looking Beyond Medical Records, Practice Fusion Lands A Whopping $70M To Bring A Big Data Cure To The Healthcare Crisis
The world of digital health startups has begun to explode over the last two years — and innovation in healthcare along with it — but nonetheless, the latest reports show a landscape that is still suffering from a dearth of seed investments, investors that are still “dabbling,” and an absence of a powerful player like Google or Facebook. Today, however, Practice Fusion appears poised to take up the reigns and perhaps create that blockbuster IPO that the digital health space has been waiting for.
Since its inception in 2005, Practice Fusion has been on a mission to re-invent the stodgy, archaic world of Healthcare IT by offering a free, digital platform for Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) to doctors, their practices and their patients. Fast forward to 2013, and over 100,000 doctors have adopted Practice Fusion’s EMR platform and are now using it to prescribe, communicate with providers, order labs and document visits.
Today, the startup made it clear just how strong its growth has been over the past few years, announcing a whopping $70 million Series D investment, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and institutional investors OrbiMed Advisors and Deerfield Management Company. The startup’s existing investors, including Artis Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures and Felicis Ventures also contributed to the round, which brings its total capital to $134 million.
The big question, of course, is just what this massive infusion of capital means for a company at this stage in the game. In a conversation this week, Practice Fusion founder and CEO Ryan Howard was unwilling to put a timeline on a potential IPO, but he did say that the company’s new $70 million would give it the capital it needs to head in that direction and that, looking forward, he has “every intent of taking [Practice Fusion] public.”
With Bloomberg reporting that this new round values the company in the ballpark of $700 million, Practice Fusion has become one of the largest digital health startups of this new generation, and it seems that, on the IPO front, it’s not a matter of “if” but “when.” The company’s growth, Howard says, has compounded since raising $34 million in series C back in June of 2012.
Today, more than four million patient visits are being managed on the startup’s platform, a number which has grown 75 percent year-over-year over the last 24-odd months. In turn, this has allowed Practice Fusion to expand its aspirations on the data front, increasing its de-identified data platform, which Howard claims is now the largest realtime clinical dataset in the U.S. Companies in the healthcare market, today, he says, are feeling the pressure of consolidation, which is why the team has been pulling all available levers to scale as quickly as possible.
The team itself has expanded to over 300, a large chunk of those hires coming in the last 12 months, and the company recently purchased another handful of floors in its office building in downtown San Francisco. With its new funding, Howard says that he plans to continue expanding both its team and the ways in which its leveraging its data platform, which has become a significant driver of its revenue growth — a growth rate that, by the way, has increased 300 percent since 2012, he says.
This clinical dataset, Howard claims, is now nearly four times the size of comparable systems owned by Kaiser Permanente and Veterans Administrations combined. Earlier this year, the company launched a new subscription research tool for doctors, reporters, analysts and pharmaceutical companies, called “Insight,” which was designed to showcase the ways in which it’s beginning to leverage its dataset to increase access to patient health information — and help diverse set of players involved in healthcare glean insight from that data.
The company also launched Patient Fusion, another example of how the company is productizing its data set, and has since set its sights on becoming “the Salesforce.com for doctors and the Facebook for health,” as we wrote earlier this year. With Patient Fusion, the company’s platform now allows anyone to compare compare doctor reviews and book appointments within an hour of arriving at the doctor’s office.
Yet, unlike Yelp, as I wrote in Many, “which would allow users to rate doctors even if they’ve never stepped foot in their office, Patient Fusion aggregates ratings from patients after their visits. This allows the company to not only build a database of verified reviews (based on visits it knows actually took place), but to lay the groundwork for a sizable local physician search engine as well.”
The site’s reviews now number in the millions, and through these products, along with a tool that helps patients better understand and manage their health spending, the company has been looking to take the next step towards becoming a full-service health information platform. “If the initial launch of Patient Fusion brought the company into Yelp (and ZocDoc) territory,” we surmised at the time, “then its new free service marks the beginning of Practice Fusion’s own version of Mint.com for health.”
The company has been busy on the product front with Patient Fusion and Insight, but with the new round, Practice Fusion has also been looking to beef up its strategic partners, especially those who can help the company leverage its growth (on both product and business fronts) and guide it down the road to a future IPO.
As part of its $70 million infusion, for example, Beth Seidenberg, MD, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, will be joining the startup’s board of directors. Thus far, although it operates in a world of old, traditional healthcare players, Practice Fusion has identified more as a technology company than a healthcare company, in the traditional sense. But, with Seidenberg now on its board, who brings experience as the founding CEO of two biotech companies and the former Senior VP and Chief Medical Officer of Amgen — along with its strategic investments from OrbiMed Advisors and Deerfield Management Company — Practice Fusion is showing that its begun to listen to the Old World as well.
And, as the company accelerates the rate at which its growing (and scaling) and works toward a potential IPO, advice and counsel from these stakeholders will become increasingly valuable. Especially considering that the U.S. healthcare landscape is undergoing a seismic transformation, particularly concerning the coordination of care, how healthcare providers measure their own performance and optimize for cost efficiency. Healthcare is moving toward a more patient-centric model, in which the success of care will be more focused on patient outcomes, whether they understand treatments and care and whether that care is actually living up to its promise.
Howard believes that Practice Fusion is in a unique position, sitting as it does between the tech and healthcare industries, to effect national health reform and, through its partnerships with life sciences companies, help them develop new population health management initiatives, which include compliance with public health guidelines and reports on market trends, among others. Today, Howard says, Practice Fusion has struck partnerships with 18 of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies in the U.S.
In turn, its new funding will also enable Practice Fusion to continue to expand its relationships with the enterprise, including labs, billing centers and imaging centers, which today number over 300. Through these enterprise partnerships (and its APIs), the company has helped its partners manage more than one million lab transactions and 2.7 million prescriptions — in September alone.
Looking forward, the CEO says that his company will look to expand its API platform in the coming year to further develop its relationships with health developers and engineers and reach into the vast (and growing) landscape of mobile health apps on the market — a number that is closing in on 100,000.
All in all, Practice Fusion is moving quickly toward its goal of providing healthcare providers and patients with a more holistic view of their health, from EMRs to expenses. Howard believes that its growing dataset can help open the door to a laundry list of new innovations, cures, and, through partnerships, help solve some of the biggest costs and pain points that inflict the average patient. Considering that 30 percent of all health care spending in the U.S. (or more than $750B per year) could be avoided without reducing outcomes, Practice Fusion’s contributions is well-positioned to help move that needle.
With $3B Under Management, Simplee Grabs $10M To Carry Medical Bill Payments Into The Smartphone Era
In 2009, Tomer Shoval went on vacation with his family to Mexico, which unfortunately ended on a sour note — and one with which many travelers can empathize — they all got sick. Back in the U.S. several months later, Shoval and his wife started receiving a series of invoices and summaries of benefits, which seemed to add insult to injury. The bills were expensive, the invoices were complex, and what their insurance covered and what it didn’t was confusing.
Frustrated and beginning to get the sense that he wasn’t alone, Shoval quit his job eBay (where he was an executive) and co-founded Simplee with Roberto Rabinovich and Tom Tsarfati to help both patients and healthcare systems understand and manage healthcare expenses — from the comfort of their smartphones.
Fast forward to 2013, Simplee is tracking and managing more than $3 billion in patient medical expenses and now processes “tens of millions” in patient payments each year, Shoval tells us. Since launching in 2011, the startup has raised $7.8 million from investors like Greylock IL, The Social+Capital Partnership and Embarcadero Ventures, and today, with adoption continuing, Simplee is announcing that it has adding $10 million in Series B financing, led by Heritage Group. Existing investors, Social+Capital and Greylock IL, also contributed to the round, bringing the startup’s total investment to just under $18 million.
Shoval attributes the raise, and the startup’s growth over the last two years, in part, to the rise in consumer-driven healthcare in the U.S. People are increasingly choosing insurance coverage that comes with the pain of high deductibles, which means that patients have begun to pay of the cost of healthcare out of their own pockets. In fact, Shoval says that the average family in the U.S., on top of the cost of insurance, pays an additional $4,000 every year.
Increasingly, patients are confused what exactly they’re paying for and why, while, on the other side, hospitals, practices and care providers have to deal with collecting a growing share of costs directly from these confused patients — rather than insurance companies. To help consumers deal with the hassle of confusing healthcare payments, Simplee launched a platform that combined the financial management tools of Mint.com with a mobile wallet to make the process easier to manage, to track visits, monitor benefits and pay their bills online.
In addition to allowing users to track expenditures by each family member, the app also acts as a payment platform so that users can pay their bills direct, link their spending accounts and alert them to problems with billing — a huge value-add considering the changes that the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) will bring to this space. Today, the app offers coverage for 80 percent of insurance plans in the U.S., and Simplee continues to work to expand the list of insurance providers it supports, the co-founder says.
Another factor that has contributed to growth on the business side was the launch of SimpleePAY earlier this year — a B2B-style payment and loyalty platform that gives hospitals the ability to more easily distribute and collect bills, texting and emailing patients simple URLs instead of sending out printed versions. The goal was to enable hospitals to access the same kind of medical wallet it had made available to consumers, giving them a more robust set of features through which they could cut costs, increase revenues and deliver new features, along with a more modern billing experience.
The startup is already working with partners like El Camino Hospital in Mountain View to enable patient payments online, and today, it announced that Emergency Medicine Associates — the largest provider of emergency room services in Washington D.C. — will be deploying SimpleePAY as well.
In the coming months, Simplee hopes to continue expanding its roster of SimpleePAY customers, leveraging its new strategic investment from the Heritage Group — an organization that represents hundreds of hospitals across the U.S., investing in solutions that seek to “reduce cost, improve outcomes and increase the efficiency of healthcare delivery.”
With the new funding under its belt, Shoval says that Simplee will look to significantly expand its team of 30, and continue to invest in innovation and growing sales and marketing around SimpleePAY, which has become its chief source of revenue. But, in the end, he says, Simplee will look to stick to its core mission, which is helping both patients and healthcare providers to reduce the complexity of healthcare payments — even as Obamacare makes that job all the more difficult.
For more, find Simplee at home here.
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