Tracking an aspect of your health is one of the most popular applications for wearables these days. In the U.S. alone, 44% of Americans own devices specifically for this purpose, according to one recent report. A startup called Junction believes that more can be done with that data: It can be shared with researchers and labs to speed up how that data can be used in your own healthcare services.
On Tuesday, Junction announced $18 million in funding to expand its approach to enable just that: an API and related tech that can connect labs to more than 500 different wearable devices to speed up how those labs can work for users.
European VC Creandum is leading the round in the startup, which previously was called Vital.
A few other companies are attempting to link data and devices, such as Health Gorilla, which has raised $77.7 million to date, and Change Healthcare, which has raised $48 million.
The core concept behind Junction — which got its start in London but is now headquartered in New York — is that the future of healthcare is in the home, not in the hospital. Today, people attend clinics to provide diagnostics to inform medical decisions, but there is an alternative: Much of that data can be collected continuously through wearables.
“We started out with devices, building integrations for different medical devices,” Maitham Dib, Junction founder and CEO, told TechCrunch over a call. “You have a widget that you embed into your app or your web app, and that allows any patient to share that basic device data with you.” Junction got its start initially with providing technology to standardize all the data from the disparate devices, and then it expanded into lab testing. “So now, we facilitate ordering labs in the U.S.”
Dib was previously an engineer at Babylon Health — the startup that reached a valuation of $2 billion on the promise of modernizing how people engaged with doctors and healthcare services through the magic of AI and telehealth services. The business had big ambitions but eventually fell apart over concerns about patient safety, corporate governance, and unit economics.
Junction is taking a much more focused approach to healthcare modernization by focusing just on one aspect of it: how the many devices that are already in the market can be better commandeered to yield data in a more cost-effective and faster way to help patients get into care plans.
“We’ve got over 2 million devices connected on our platform today,” he said. “And we’re on track to do about a million lab tests this year as well. So it’s pie in the sky. A lot of people are actually using it.”
The Junction platform allows companies to order lab tests across all 50 U.S. states, and receive results from over 10+ labs, through both in-person and at-home tests.
Junction is growing at an important juncture in the world of healthcare. Some 60% of U.S. adults have a chronic disease, which often means a great deal of home-monitoring devices. These days, care teams must devote hours to collecting data from these devices manually. But on the other side, a wave of new devices and advances in how to collect and use data from those devices could help speed up that system.
“Data is the bottleneck to unleashing the potential of new technologies like AI in healthcare,” said Sabina Wizander, a partner at Creandum in a statement. “So much of healthcare infrastructure is built on legacy systems and communicates using outdated methods like fax and pen and paper. Junction solves this problem by providing companies with healthcare infrastructure for lab testing and device data integration.”
Junction has now secured more than 140 healthcare organizations as customers, including Found, Parsley Health, and Evidation.
Also participating in this A round is Y Combinator, Point Nine, and Amino Collective. Junction raised a seed round with Point Nine and Y Combinator three years ago.
