Glooko gets $16.5 million from Canaan Partners, Medtronic

By Jonah Comstock

glooko metersyncDiabetes management platform Glooko has raised $16.5 million in a round led by Canaan Partners. The round also included a strategic investment from Medtronic as well as funding from additional investors The Social+Capital Partnership and Samsung.

Glooko began by making a cord that connected various glucometers to a user's smartphone. Over time, the company has moved from a connector chord to a Bluetooth wireless connection, and has added a provider-facing diabetes management platform called Glooko Population Tracker. Built into the population tracker is Hypomap, a collaboration with Joslin Diabetes Center focused on increasing hypoglycemia awareness amongst patients with diabetes. In November, HypoMap began integrating activity data from consumer activity trackers in addition to glucometer data.

Glooko CEO Rick Altinger told MobiHealthNews that Glooko will use the funding to expand their platform to connect to continuous glucose monitors and pumps, likely including those from new investor Medtronic.

"Just as we do with lots of other device companies, we’ll be partnering with [Medtronic] to integrate data from their pump and CGM into the Glooko platform," he said. "And we’ll be announcing numerous other partnerships in this area, one of which is already public. Dexcom announced at the JP Morgan conference that they are working with Glooko."

Moving into CGMs will likely require additional FDA clearances, which Glooko is in the process of seeking. The other use the company has planned for the funding is building more "smart analytics" to help providers make use of the data that's coming in. One aspect of that would be custom alerts for different patients.

"If someone is new to insulin or is newly diagnosed, you can put in certain triggers and flags that are custom to that specific patient, so that if they run into this at-risk situation and you are logged into the dashboard, on demand, you get to see which of these at risk custom flags have been triggered," he said. "Another smart analytics example would be, as we do pumps, helping people understand the impact of when they change their insulin set. So if they don’t change it per schedule, how does that impact them?"

The company is also focused on making Population Tracker slot easily into a doctor's workflow, whether that means integrating with the EHR or just clearly displaying all the data from different sources in a dashboard that's laid out the same for each patient, regardless of what device the patient is using to track their glucose and activity.

Glooko also announced some new provider partners the company has begun working with recently.

"Right now we're focused on the larger and leading health systems out there," he said. "Joslin in Boston is one that we’ve talked about before. One that we haven't talked about before is Atrius in Boston, that is a large ACO, they’re also known as Harvard Vanguard. These are entities that are increasingly at risk and incentivized to help do more preventative and proactive care. Another example, and I think this is the first time this is coming out, would be the Diabetes and Glandular Disease (DGD) clinic in San Antonio, Texas. ... These are key opinion leaders in the diabetes community. We’re making great headway there."

Jordan Flight Luxe