Eureka Health – a new community dedicated to helping chronic disease patients share experiences and discover the latest treatments – launched to provide hope to people with chronic diseases. Emerging from stealth with thousands already engaged in its Long Covid group, the AI-powered platform added metabolic disease, autoimmune disorders, ME/CFS, and related conditions. And it will expand into other conditions in the coming weeks.
The company announced that it had raised $7 million in funding. And the seed round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from South Park Commons, Bling Capital, SciFi VC, Able Partners, and Bow Capital. Angels with healthcare and tech expertise include Anne Wojcicki (Co-founder of 23andMe), Susan Wojcicki (former CEO of YouTube), and Marty Tenenbaum (Founder and Chairman of Cancer Commons), among others. The funds will be used to build and grow the community, expand its treatment database, and ultimately influence and advance treatment research.
There is a huge demand for quality, personalized data on treatment benefits and side effects, but very little exists because research is slow and expensive. And patients trust other patients– and they are already sharing their experiences in an ad-hoc way that doesn’t advance collective understanding.
Through Eureka, patients can discover new treatments working for others in the community, find patients with a similar health profile and learn what has helped them, and search for data on any treatment in an easy-to-use database. And they can also connect with others to discuss their experiences in a safe and supportive space. Importantly, patients on Eureka have full control over their data at all times; they can remain anonymous if they choose and decide what data they would like to share and what to keep private.
Eureka can do this by using large language models (LLMs) to create a database with millions of real patient experiences in addition to the detailed reports being added by the community. And the company continues to develop LLMs to interpret and summarize research, match similar patients, provide personalized predictions of the best treatments, and plans to offer patients their own AI assistant to help them understand the pros and cons of any treatment. With such capabilities, Eureka is poised to become a supercharged patient community that guides future research agendas and delivers immeasurable value to users.
Eureka started when Zain Memon had to become a part-time scientist himself when his mother was diagnosed with a rare chronic disease. And after spending four years trying to navigate black holes of information and with limited access to others affected by the same disorder, Zain felt inspired to create a solution.
After spending over 20 years working with startups from early stage to IPO that served millions of users, Zain connected with Noah MacCallum, the second product manager at Forward Health, who helped launch and scale a nationwide primary care network. In addition to his work in the tech sphere, Noah conducted research at MIT and Harvard, with hundreds of citations on his publications, giving him a unique lens into the ideal treatment community. The pair discussed their vision for a new model for treatment discovery and community building. The Eureka platform came to life based on their deep backgrounds in engineering and product development and their personal experiences.
Now the Long Covid, metabolic disease, autoimmune disorders, ME/CFS communities are open to all. Because Eureka is driven by the interests and needs of its community, the company encourages anyone touched by chronic illness to sign up for its waitlist for new conditions, as groups are being added each week.
KEY QUOTES:
“Long Covid is painful, debilitating, and can make you feel like you’re losing your mind. That’s a hard thing for people who have never experienced it to understand. Eureka is where I go to learn from others going through the same thing. Some people are finding relief from simple treatments while other treatments might be a waste of time or money for someone with my symptoms. Eureka also lets me help others by sharing what I’ve tried.”
— Beren Airstone, a member of Eureka’s Long Covid community
“Beyond the basic, first line treatments, which didn’t work, my mom’s doctor had no answers. We were on our own, and that’s a scary, frustrating place to be. Two key learnings stood out: collecting health data is extremely expensive and typically only done in specialized studies on hundreds or thousands of people, which rules out many rare diseases like my mom’s, and the power of community is the best way to offset this deficit.”
— Zain Memon
“At Khosla Ventures, we invest early in ideas that are bold and impactful. With Eureka, patients have a platform to exchange data and rare experiences with others, giving them a community in times when they need it the most.”
— Adina Teklu, partner at Khosla Ventures
