Vision Fund leads $100m Series C for Singapore-founded Biofourmis

Existing investors Openspace Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, and EDBI also took part. Sequoia India and MassMutual led a $35 million Series B in May of last year, after which Biofourmis announced plans to relocate its headquarters from Singapore to Boston. The company wanted to be closer to its customers and expand operations in the US.

Since the Series B, Biofourmis claims to have has increased its revenue significantly through partnerships with seven pharmaceutical companies and 10 health systems globally. It has also made several acquisitions, including Biovotion, a maker of wearable biosensors, and Gaido Health, an oncology-focused digital therapeutics business that was previously part of Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

With the Series C, Biofourmis has restructured its business into two verticals. Biofourmis Health is the existing platform that builds a customized profile based on a patient's physiology and background and then tracks their health using data from clinical grade wearable devices. If a deterioration is detected, medical professionals can intervene days before a critical event.

The company initially focused on patients recovering from heart surgery, for whom hospital readmission rates globally are as high as 35% in the first 90 days after discharge. It has expanded into respiratory illnesses and cancer, especially for patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiation therapy or CAR-T treatment.

The second business line, Biofourmis Therapeutics, focuses on clinically validated software-based therapeutics. The idea is that digital solutions can work in conjunction with pharmacotherapies, augmenting drug efficacy and reducing costs to deliver better patient outcomes. For example, an artificial intelligence-enabled treatment algorithm prescribes optimal guideline-directed therapies while a smart phone app helps the patient stick to the care plan.

"COVID-19 is pushing remote monitoring and digital therapeutics to the forefront of medicine. Our vision is to use digital medicine to empower patients, clinicians and researchers everywhere by providing software-as-a-treatment for patients with unmet clinical needs, from post-acute care to optimal medication therapy," said Biofourmis CEO Kuldeep Singh Rajput, in a statement. He believes that healthcare has advanced by at least five years in the past seven months.

The new funding will go towards accelerating our global expansion, advancing the company's digital therapeutics pipeline, developing additional care pathways, and driving deeper integration with health system, hospital, pharmaceutical and clinical research partners. Biofourmis has several as-yet-unreleased solutions across cardiology, respiratory, oncology, and pain. The US and key Asian markets such as China and Japan, are its major targets.

"We believe predictive health is the future of medicine and Biofourmis is a leader in using AI and machine learning-based solutions to advance digital therapeutics," said Greg Moon, a managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. "We are excited to partner with Biofourmis and support their mission of using AI and wearables data to enable personalized care."

SoftBank is investing via its second Vision Fund, which was announced in July 2019 with $108 billion in initial commitments. Since then, the firm has struggled with several high-profile bets involving the first Vision Fund – a $100 billion vehicle launched in 2018 – going awry. SoftBank said in April that the fund would book a loss of $16.5 billion for the financial year ended March.

Openspace and Aviva Ventures led the Biofourmis' Series A in late 2017. Both re-upped for the Series B, which also featured SGInnovate and EDBI – both strategic investors controlled by the Singapore government – and Jianke, a private equity-backed Chinese online pharmacy business.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Healthcare
• Technology
• North America
• Expansion
• Singapore
• Asia
• USA
• Softbank
• Openspace Ventures
• Sequoia Capital
• EDBI
• MassMutual Ventures
• Growth capital