- Big Health, a global leader in digital therapeutics focused on helping millions back to good mental health, announced it raised $39 million
Big Health — a global leader in digital therapeutics focused on helping millions back to good mental health — announced it has raised $39 million in a Series B financing led by Gilde Healthcare and joined by co-lead Morningside Ventures, existing investors Kaiser Permanente Ventures (KPV) and Octopus Ventures, and Samsung NEXT.
Janke Dittmer (general partner at Gilde) and Isaac Cheng (partner at Morningside) will join the Big Health board — which also includes Liz Rockett (KPV), Alliott Cole (Octopus) and Arun Gupta (Founder, Quartet). And Big Health will use the funds to invest in new product development, expand its distribution channels, and scale its commercialization activities.
This round of funding is part of a series of major milestones that the company announced recently. For example, Big Health announced a partnership with CVS Health in June 2019. This partnership streamlines customer adoption of its digital therapeutics and the first step was to add Big Health’s Sleepio (for poor sleep) to the CVS pharmacy benefit management formulary — which simplifies employer sign-up and reimbursement.
In early April of this year — in response to the COVID-19 pandemic — the company announced its Community Access Program — which enabled companies and their employees to sign up for free access to Sleepio and Daylight. And so far, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), Boston Medical Center, AmeriGas, and over fifty other companies have signed up for this program thus adding more than six million covered employee lives in a matter of weeks.
Plus Big Health recently announced key findings from a health economic evaluation of Sleepio at a Fortune 500 company — which compared two groups of employees: a group of Sleepio users and a matched control group — and their respective healthcare costs over an 18-month follow-up period. And the results demonstrated 28% lower total annualized healthcare costs in the cohort of Sleepio users as compared to the matched control group.
Key Quotes:
“We entered 2020 having doubled our revenues in 2019. That’s because customers such as Target, Comcast, and The Home Depot recognize that our digital therapeutics can fill a growing gap in their portfolio of mental health benefits. With this funding and with Janke’s and Isaac’s strategic insights, we are well positioned to accelerate our new product innovation, and add more sales and distribution capacity to meet increasing demand.”
– Peter Hames, Big Health co-founder and chief executive officer. Big Health was founded by Hames and Professor Colin Espie
“We’re excited about the mission of Big Health to provide fully automated mental health solutions to millions of people worldwide. Our investment philosophy is to support fast-growing, global businesses that deliver better care at lower cost and Big Health is a perfect fit.”
– Janke Dittmer of Gilde Healthcare
“We’re very pleased to add Big Health, the leading digital therapeutics company in mental health, to our therapeutics portfolio. Big Health has led the market in their commitment to clinical evidence, and in pioneering innovative go-to-market strategies. We believe the company is ideally positioned to dominate the digital therapeutics space, and to help millions back to good mental health as a result.”
– Isaac Cheng, M.D. of Morningside Ventures
