BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Buoy Health (www.buoyhealth.com), a health technology company that develops digital tools to help people from the moment they get sick start their care on the right foot, today announced the closing of a $6.7M Series A funding round led by F-Prime Capital Partners and an undisclosed strategic investor. FundRx and angel investors, including Jack Connors, also invested in the round. These funds will be used to help Buoy Health scale its operations to meet an ever growing marketplace demand for a new type of digital symptom checker that will offer a more accurate assessment of what is wrong, and provide tangible options for where to go and what to do next, to help people quickly and easily embark on the right path to getting better.
“At Buoy Health, we believe that when it comes to healthcare, knowledge is power,” said Dr. Andrew Le, CEO and Co-founder. “And power can’t reside in the hands of doctors alone. That’s why we’ve brought together some of the most renowned and forward thinking partners in the industry to help us both strategically scale our efforts and to navigate new and effective ways to integrate our smart symptom checker, Buoy, into hospitals, doctors’ offices and insurance systems. Our mission is to help people take control of their healthcare journey from the moment they get sick. And, fueled by this new financing and our growing team, we have the power to do it.”
Buoy Health will use this round of financing to invest in a few key areas, including the recruitment of additional clinical researchers, engineers, and marketers from across a variety of industries. It will also bring on an all-star board of medical advisors, including physicians from FundRx, to deepen expertise in different specialties. The company will also use the funds to build out important back-end integrations with hospitals and providers to ensure Buoy Health can make care for patients, providers and doctors simpler and more efficient.
“The team at Buoy has taken an innovative approach to solving the problem of health symptom search,” said Carl Byers, Executive Partner at F-Prime. “By engaging patients intelligently at the moment they experience symptoms, Buoy can deliver triage at scale in a way that can be adopted seamlessly within the healthcare system as a new digital front door to the care journey.”
Buoy Health’s financing round comes at a time when the industry is increasingly investing in digital innovations to solve problems related to accessing the healthcare system and helping patients to get to the right care setting on the first attempt. By addressing the problem that happens when people attempt to search their symptoms online, Buoy aims to guide patients via AI-powered triage to the right care setting and to make engagement with the healthcare system more efficient. This innovation represents a first step toward a broader vision of more automated care management tools to allow the health system to deliver high quality care at scale in a more cost-effective manner. The company is engaged with provider and payer organizations to use this approach to achieve these goals.
Since its public launch, Buoy Health has experienced rapid growth in its user base as patients have been drawn to the company’s intuitive evidence-based online experience. Buoy Health’s smart symptom checker, Buoy, has been used by over a quarter of a million people so far to identify symptoms ranging from the common cold to reproductive issues to things as granular as how a change in running shoes may be the root cause for a specific ailment. For more information on Buoy please visit: www.buoyhealth.com.
About Buoy Health
Buoy Health is a health technology company that develops digital tools to help people from the moment they get sick start their care on the right foot. Formed at the Harvard Innovation Laboratory in Boston MA, Buoy Health’s team of doctors, product designers, and software engineers developed its smart symptom checker, Buoy, in direct response to the downward spiral we’ve all faced when we attempt to self-diagnose our symptoms online. The technology behind Buoy leverages artificial intelligence — powered by advanced machine learning and proprietary granular data — to resemble an exchange you would have with your favorite doctor — to provide consumers with a real-time, accurate analysis of their symptoms and to help them easily and quickly embark on the right path to getting better. Buoy Health is based in Boston and was founded in 2014. For more information, please visit www.buoyhealth.com.
About F-Prime
F-Prime Capital is a global venture capital firm investing in life sciences, healthcare and technology. Since 1969, F-Prime has worked closely with entrepreneurs and academics to create innovative solutions to some of the world's most significant challenges in healthcare and technology. For more information, please visit www.fprimecapital.com.
About FundRx
FundRx is a venture capital platform that builds and invests in the next-generation of healthcare and life sciences startups. Our community of hundreds of venture partners – themselves physicians, scientists, and industry executives – contribute their capital, time, and expertise to the FundRx portfolio, providing exceptional hands-on support and guidance to nurture great companies. We take a scientific approach to investing, working with a distributed network of experts to peer-review prospective startups, and are a pioneer in venture capital technology – with a dedicated engineering organization enabling advanced analytics and screening of investments. We are headquartered in New York City, with offices in Chicago and San Francisco. For more information, please visit www.fundrx.com.
