StuffThatWorks, a digital health startup leveraging AI, crowdsourcing, and machine learning to match patients with treatments, raised $9 million in seed funding.
The funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, 83North, and Ofek Ventures.
According to the company, the proceeds will accelerate go-to-market efforts as its platform experiences pandemic-driven growth.
According to the company, whether mundane or life-threatening disease, finding the right doctor or specialist is often quite challenging. For most, the next step is usually searching for other people’s experiences online to find something that works better.
“People are the ones that hold in-depth knowledge about themselves, their condition, and the way treatments affect them,” said Yael Elish, CEO, and co-founder of StuffThatWorks.
“Collecting this knowledge in an organized and structured way across is the only way to compare effectiveness in scale. And when that’s done across all chronic conditions, it creates a gold mine of data that can dramatically advance and facilitate research to the benefit of both the patient and the medical community,’ added Yael Elish.
According to Google Health Vice President David Feinberg, an estimated 7% of Google’s daily searches are health-related.
Millions of people share their personal treatment stories in online support groups, but there is no way to make sense of it. StuffThatWorks, which taps AI, solves this problem by providing patients with a place to share their experiences in a structured way, optimized for analysis. Its cloud platform enables people with chronic conditions to share personal treatments and discover options that work best for them. The platform’s algorithms transform members’ data about rare, chronic, and orphan diseases, including diabetes and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, into personalized treatment effectiveness insights, according to the company.
With 180,000 contributors across over 100 conditions, the company says it has the up-to-date patient-reported outcome knowledge base optimized for research.
“With more than half of the world’s populations suffering from at least one chronic condition, chronic illness is a rapidly growing global epidemic,” said Adam Fisher, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We believe that StuffThatWorks can not only help millions of people get access to valuable knowledge on treatment effectiveness but also disrupt and innovate the way data from patients in the real world is collected and analyzed today.”
The company works with researchers, medical organizations, and patient advocacy groups on patient-reported outcome research.
Image credit: StuffThatWorks
