Makers of Online CBT-I Program Raise $39 Million in Series B Financing

Big Health—makers of Sleepio, an online cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) program, as well as developer of mental health therapeutics—has raised $39 million in a Series B financing. The financing round was led by Gilde Healthcare and joined by co-lead Morningside Ventures; existing investors Kaiser Permanente Ventures (KPV) and Octopus Ventures; and Samsung NEXT.

Janke Dittmer, general partner at Gilde and Isaac Cheng, MD, partner at Morningside, will join the Big Health board, which also includes Liz Rockett (KPV), Alliott Cole (Octopus), and Arun Gupta (Founder, Quartet). Big Health will use the funds to invest in new product development, expand its distribution channels, and scale its commercialization activities.

“We’re excited about the mission of Big Health to provide fully automated mental health solutions to millions of people worldwide,” says Janke Dittmer of Gilde Healthcare, in a release. “Our investment philosophy is to support fast-growing, global businesses that deliver better care at lower cost, and Big Health is a perfect fit.”

Morningside Ventures’ Cheng says in a release, “We’re very pleased to add Big Health, the leading digital therapeutics company in mental health, to our therapeutics portfolio. Big Health has led the market in their commitment to clinical evidence, and in pioneering innovative go-to-market strategies. We believe the company is ideally positioned to dominate the digital therapeutics space, and to help millions back to good mental health as a result.”

This news marks another in a series of milestones for Big Health.

• In June 2019, Big Health announced a partnership with CVS Health, to streamline customer adoption of its digital therapeutics; the first step was to add Big Health’s Sleepio to the CVS pharmacy benefit management formulary, which simplifies employer sign-up and reimbursement.
• In early April of this year, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced its Community Access Program, which enabled companies and their employees to sign up for free access to Sleepio and Daylight. To date, the UK’s National Health Service, Boston Medical Center, AmeriGas, and more than 50 other companies have signed up for this program, adding more than 6 million covered employee lives in a matter of weeks.
• Big Health also recently announced key findings from a health economic evaluation of Sleepio at a Fortune 500 company, which compared two groups of employees—a group of Sleepio users and a matched control group—and their respective healthcare costs over an 18-month follow-up period. The results demonstrated 28% lower total annualized healthcare costs in the cohort of Sleepio users, as compared to the matched control group.

“We entered 2020 having doubled our revenues in 2019,” says Peter Hames, Big Health co-founder and CEO, in a release. “That’s because customers such as Target, Comcast, and The Home Depot recognize that our digital therapeutics can fill a growing gap in their portfolio of mental health benefits. With this funding and with Janke’s and Isaac’s strategic insights, we are well positioned to accelerate our new product innovation, and add more sales and distribution capacity to meet increasing demand.”

from Sleep Review https://ift.tt/2Cp3AjY