- Healthcare-security company Elektra Labs announced it raised $2.9 million in seed funding and launched the Atlas platform
Elektra Labs — a healthcare-security company building a platform to review and dispense connected technologies remotely (wearables, biosensors, etc.) — announced it raised $2.9 million in a seed round of funding led by Maverick Ventures with participation from Arkitekt Ventures, Boost VC, Founder Collective, Lux Capital, SV Angel, Village Global, and sixteen angels, including founders and CEOs from companies like PillPack, Flatiron Health, National Vision, Shippo, Revel, Verge Genomics, and several others. With this round of funding, Elektra plans to improve infrastructure for the efficient and responsible deployment of wearables and connected biosensors.
“The increase in FDA clearances for digital health products coupled with heavy investment in technology has led to accelerated adoption of connected tools in both clinical trials and routine care. However, this adoption has not come without controversy,” said Andy (Andrea) Coravos, co-founder and CEO of Elektra Labs. “During my time as an Entrepreneur in Residence in the FDA’s Digital Health Unit, it became clear to me that similar to pharmacies which review, prepare, and dispense drug components, our healthcare system needs infrastructure to review, prepare, and dispense connected technologies components. Questions around the security, accuracy and bias in the data from wearables have made researchers and developers confront the complexity of bringing these technologies to market. At Elektra, we set out to build that pharmacy-like infrastructure, and we’re excited to be supported by a seed round to help us get there.”
Along with this funding round, Elektra is launching a new product called Atlas — which catalogs connected biometric monitoring technologies that can be used in clinical trials and routine clinical care. And the Atlas platform simplifies the evaluation and deployment of connected tools that collect behavioral or physiological measurements.
For the pharma, biotech, and contract research organizations conducting clinical trials, Atlas serves as a catalog of trustworthy remote monitoring technologies and digital biomarkers for decentralized clinical trials. And Elektra Labs is additionally building this infrastructure to support hospital systems and insurers — which is the backbone of digital pharmacopeia.
Atlas was built after interviewing over 300 stakeholders in the software-enabled clinical trial ecosystem, and they discovered that people wanted a better way to evaluate trustworthy tools. Like a drug label or nutrition label, Atlas publishes connected technology labels that highlight critical aspects of the product. And this label identifies objective measures around the product’s validation, usability, utility, security, and data governance components.
Elektra Labs is a part of FDA-led #WeHeartHackers medical device security initiative along with eleven other companies, including Mayo Clinic, Philips Health, GE Healthcare, and Abbott. And the Elektra team also announced its Strategic Advisory Board, including Ariel Stern PhD, Beau Woods, Bill Wood MD MPH, Christine Eun, Eric Perakslis PhD, John Wilbanks, Julia Austin, Noah Zimmerman PhD, and Sofia Warner MD.
“At Maverick, we’re always searching for disruptive brands who find ways to make the world easier; Andy and her team blew us away with their vision to build tools that allow researchers and clinicians to perform at the top of their game,” added Ambar Bhattacharyya, Managing Director at Maverick Ventures. “As accelerated adoption of consumer health technology increases, developers have had to face complex issues around accuracy and bias that stems from the collected data. We look forward to seeing Elektra Labs exercise their strengths in improving access to care.”
By 2023, an estimated 5 million individuals will be remotely monitored by healthcare providers. And in the digital era of medicine, Elektra Labs is committed to advancing the safe, effective, and personalized adoption of connected technologies in real-world settings.
Elektra Labs was incubated through the Harvard Launch Lab X and Plug and Play Accelerators. And it was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps grant for its technology.
