Invitae, a medical genetic testing company, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Ciitizen, an electronic medical records platform focused on cancer patients, for approximately $325 million.
The acquisition terms include around $125 million in cash and approximately 7,070,000 shares of Invitae common stock. Invitae will also issue about $226 million restricted stock units to new employees who join the company as part of the acquisition.
Ciitizen has raised $20 million in venture capital funding to date, according to Mercom’s digital health funding data.
Invitae, in a press statement, said the acquisition would enhance its platform by providing patients an easy-to-use, centralized hub for their genomic and clinical information, which together comprise a dataset with the potential to drive research and improve healthcare decision making.
Ciitizen offers a patient-centric electronic medical records platform that enables patients to collect, store and share their medical records in a single location. According to the company, the platform’s machine learning and AI technologies abstract critical information from unstructured health records to advance the understanding of diseases, match patients with potentially life-saving clinical trials, and enable better care decisions.
In a call with investors, Anil Sethi, Ciitizen founder, and CEO said many patients struggle to access their health records and miss opportunities to join clinical trials when they become ill. Sethi, who worked at Apple after his previous startup Gliimpse was acquired, built the company after his sister died of breast cancer in 2017.
In June 2020, Invitae acquired ArcherDX, a genomics analysis company, to scale in cancer genetics and precision oncology for $1.4 billion. In November 2019, Invitae acquired Clear Genetics, a patient-centric genetics analytics software company, for aggregate consideration of approximately $50 million.
“Invitae views the acquisition of Ciitizen as an important part of its strategy to be the industry leader across the genetic testing, software and health information technology spaces,” said Sean George, co-founder and CEO of Invitae.
“We believe combining Ciitizen’s state-of-the-art, transparent and patient-consented platform with our technologies and services will accelerate our evolution into a genome information company that informs healthcare throughout one’s life. This would give us the ability to engage patients, create an innovative patient-centered data ecosystem and deliver better outcomes for everyone,” added Sean George.
One hundred thirty-six digital health companies were acquired in the first half of 2021 compared to 83 in 1H 2020, according to the latest Mercom Digital Health Funding and M&A Report.
