Q Bio, a digital health platform, has emerged from stealth with a $40 million round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
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The Series B financing brings the company’s total funding since its inception in late 2015 to $58 million. Other backers include Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Beast Ventures, Thirty5 Venturers, Sea Lane Ventures and SciFi VC.
Because digital health platform is such a broad term, let’s break down what it means in this case. The Redwood City California-based startup claims it can give “members” a web-based comprehensive picture of their health in “75 minutes or less.”
The premise behind the company is to help identify health issues before they become worse, or as it claims: “To give individuals a deeper understanding of their own body and how it’s changing over time so they have more control over their own health.”
Indeed, most of us don’t even know we’re sick until symptoms start popping up to alert us. In some cases such as certain forms of cancer–it can already be too late. Q Bio says its platform can actually identify signs of disease at the earliest stages, before symptoms arise. If this is true, I’d say it’s revolutionary.
The way it works seems straightforward. Members register online and the company begins aggregating and digitizing their medical history. On exam day, members anonymously check in for a 75- to 90-minute exam. Two weeks later, a Q “expert” will review the results over a “secure” video chat in which members’ physicians are welcome to join.
With each additional visit, Q claims, its HIPAA-compliant platform gets more sensitive to surfacing anomalous changes in your body, then tailors the set of measurements gathered based on these anomalies and changing risk factors.
In summary, membership includes a fully comprehensive exam including a full body MRI, saliva, blood and urine analysis, a summary and a 30-minute telemedicine review of the health of each of your body’s systems. Health data is continuously updated for one year and stored in the company’s BioVault with lifetime access to review and share.
Affirm co-founder Jeff Kaditz serves as Q Bio’s CEO. As part of this new round of funding, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Vijay Pande joins Q Bio’s board, along with Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures.
Background
Kaditz co-founded the company with his own misdiagnoses from over a decade ago in mind.
Since then, he said, he’s “imagined a day when everything about a person’s body could be quickly measured, shared and analyzed.”
“It took some time to figure out some of the scaling issues and to wait for certain technologies to be cheap enough and mature enough,” Kaditz told Crunchbase News. “Our technology allows us to gather more clinical information, more quantitatively, faster and cheaper than anything else and it will only get faster and less expensive over time. We allow for a separation of where you go to get your body measured and where your doctor actually is.”
Over the past few years, the company has stealthily worked on fine-tuning its imaging protocols to determine the “most clinically relevant set of biomarkers” to include in its platform. It has 25 employees, up from 17 a year ago.
a16z’s Pande in a written statement said that“Q Bio makes true preventive medicine possible today.”
“By measuring everything from blood to imaging and more in a longitudinal way, patients can have personalized baselines and physicians the data and power to understand, interpret and utilize this data to personalize care,” he added.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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