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Flo Health Raises Over $200M, Achieves Unicorn Status in Femtech

Flo Health Raises Over $200M, Achieves Unicorn Status in Femtech

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During a Series C funding round led by General Atlantic, the innovative female wellness app Flo Health secured approximately 275 million dollars in total funds. Flo’s worth climbs past a million dollars with this substantial investment, which makes it the first wholly digital unicorn application for the health of women.

All-inclusive Medical Assistance for Females

Flo Health Raises Over $200M, Achieves Unicorn Status in Femtech

Image Source: uktech.news

Flo Health is a comprehensive platform that assists women at every stage of life, including menstruation, conception, pregnancy, and menopause. With more than 120 medical experts on staff, the app provides accurate tracking of the period and ovulation.

Customized Health Information

Flo Health offers daily visual content, expert advice, and personalized health insights to its clients. Additionally, it creates an online network that provides assistance for its users by providing a closed digital forum for talks about wellness and health-related topics.

Collaborating for increased Health

“Flo for Partners,” a new function that was introduced by Flo in 2023, provides users’ partners with scientific information regarding menstruation and reproductive health. This training improves understanding and support for relationships.

Outstanding Development and Involvement

With its founding more than eight years ago, Flo Health has grown significantly. By the end of June 2024, the app’s performance was so good , over 70 million active monthly people were using this app and there were 5 million premium consumers. Flo’s people made an estimation of total income for 2024, which was to surpass 200 million dollars and show a 50 per cent rise over the previous year, reflects this development pattern.

Also Read: Xiaomi Expands EV Production with $116 Million Site Acquisition in Beijing

A Watershed Moment for Femtech

"Reaching unicorn status is a significant milestone for Flo and the entire femtech industry," says Dmitry Gurski, co-founder and CEO." "When we founded Flo, we saw a large gap in the provision of women's health services. We now spearhead an international effort to put women's health first everywhere."

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Investing Wisely for Future Development

The goal of Flo Health, which is to improve health literacy globally and normalize conversations about women's health, will be accelerated by the investment from General Atlantic. This investment from General Atlantic will help propel Flo Health’s growth as we continue normalising conversations about women's health, improving health literacy, and raising awareness of women's health issues worldwide, especially in underserved regions.” Gurski stated.

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Dedication to Transforming Women's Health

The Chief Medical Officer of Flo Health, Anna Klepchukova, highlighted how the app is changing women's health: "With women spending 25 per cent more of their lives in poor health compared to men, we're committed to changing this unacceptable status quo."

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Strategies for Expansion

With this fresh capital, Flo hopes to expand into new market sectors including menopause and perimenopause, enhance its tech-driven healthcare information, and look at strategic expansion opportunities. The company will also benefit from General Atlantic’s expertise in the expanding consumer tech and medical industries.

Also Read: Xiaomi Expands EV Production with $116 Million Site Acquisition in Beijing

New Board Members

As an element of the investment structure, Jessie Cai along with Tanzeen Syed who is the Managing Director at General Atlantic, will be joining Flo Health’s Board of Directors. Their immense expertise will assist Flo’s ambitious expansion goals.

 
cerner corporation

Cerner Corporation – Merging Healthcare and IT.

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For the past forty years, Cerner Corporation has worked at the crossroads of health care and information technology to link individuals and systems all over the globe. They use the latest technology to develop solutions that empower communities and people to take charge of their own health. Their tools are designed to work today while also pondering about tomorrow, whether or not they are supporting the clinical, financial, or operational areas of a hospital or health system.

Establishment of the Cerner Corporation

Cerner Corporation was founded in 1979 through Arthur Andersen’s colleagues Neal Patterson, Paul Group, and Cliff Illig. Its authentic name became PGI & Associates, however, when it released its first machine, PathNet, in 1984, it was renamed Cerner. In 1986, it went public. Cerner’s customer base step by step multiplied in the late 1980s, achieving 70 sites in 1987, 120 sites in 1988, 170 sites in 1989, and 250 sites in 1990. Cerner was operating on additives of a Health Network Architecture (HNA), an incorporated IT machine designed to automate health care processes, at the time. Clients could purchase individual components or the complete machine all at once. By 1994, more than 30 customers had purchased the complete HNA machine, with another 100 purchasing more than one component of the machine.

cerner corporation
Image Source: fortune.com

Cerner bought IMC Health Care, Inc. in early 2010 in order to keep expanding its health offerings to industrial employers, pharmacies, and health applications outside of Cerner.
Cerner Corporation announced its intention to purchase Siemens Health Services, Germany’s Siemens AG’s health information technology business, for $1.3 billion on August 5, 2014. On February 2, 2015, the acquisition was completed.
On July 29, 2015, the Leidos Partnership for Defense Health, comprised of Cerner, Accenture, and Leidos, was awarded a 10-year, $4.3 billion contract to overhaul and manage the Department of Defense’s electronic health records.

The Company’s Offerings

Command Center
The need for situational awareness in health care systems has never been greater. The Cerner Command Center Dashboard uses near real-time data and predictive analytics to give health systems a clear view of critical resources like staffed bed capacity, care demand, and equipment – information that leaders use to anticipate and respond to patient needs. The Cerner Command Center dashboard provides actionable data insights to enable effective resource and process management in order to improve health system operations.
Cerner’s best practices for staffing and patient throughput processes, Cerner model system for integrated and automated workforce management and capacity management solutions, AWS cloud, predictive intelligence, and machine learning, and integration across Cerner platforms can all be used by the Cerner Command Center to help reduce operational costs.

HealtheReferrals
HealtheReferrals supports provider organizations, throughout any EHR and payer, in the growth and retention of patients. The product targets patients with a configurable patient-supplier algorithm which includes factors such as specialty, insurance networks, proximity to patients, and network members. The product is the most appropriate in-network provider. It also offers analytical and referral coordination capabilities to help ensure transparency through employee and affiliate networks.
The average person influences household healthcare expenditure in excess of 1,5 M$, all references count. Cerner realizes that it is critical for the health of an organization to improve margins and lower risk and provide cost-effective care. HealtheReferrals is committed to providing providers and managers with the information they need to achieve these goals, independently of EHR.

Neal Patterson, The Founder

Neal Patterson has been CEO of Cerner for 38 years, an enterprise which he co-founded in 1979 with two colleagues. Patterson was a long-time CEO of the country. With revenues of 4,8 billion US dollars in 2016 and over 25,000 employees around the world, Cerner is currently the world’s largest independent information technology provider.

Patterson was posthumously brought to the Hall of Fame in 2019 and appointed as the International Entrepreneur of the Year by the Regnier Institute of Entrepreneurship and Innovation of the University of Missouri-Kansas.
On a farm near Manchester, Oklahoma, Patterson was brought up. He obtained a Bachelor of Finance and a Masters in Business Administration from the Oklahoma State University.
As a result of the recent recurrent cancer, Neal L. Patterson died on 9 July 2017. He was 67 years old.

Brent Shafer, The CEO

Brent Shafer, Chief Executive of Cerner, is responsible for the company’s market-oriented business units, consumer brands, key strategic relations, and priority business initiatives and is responsible for developing and expanding these business units.
Shafer has been CEO of Philips North America, where she has supervised the portfolio of health technology that includes a wide range of solutions and services inpatient surveillance, imaging, clinical computer technology, sleep, and respiratory services as well as a group of leading consumer brands. Shafer previously served as the CEO of Philips’ global Home Healthcare Solutions division.

Shafer possesses extensive experience building innovative value-based business models. He has contributed to the growth of a complex multinational organization for a number of years as a senior leader with Philips. He is also a member of the Healthcare Leadership Council which brings together health leaders of the nation to develop policies, plans, and programs to implement their vision of a system that provides all Americans with affordable, high-quality care. He received a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah.

Philips

Philips – The Journey From Home Lighting to Healthcare.

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Philips started as a bulb manufacturing company and is still known as one, but there is more to it. The company has also emerged as one of the biggest healthcare technology companies. For its healthcare wing, the company works in three divisions, i.e., Personal Health, Connected Care, and Diagnosis & Treatment. For the past more than 120 years, the company has evolved as an innovative leader in the industry and is counted among the largest conglomerate. The company recorded annual revenue of €19.535 billion, with 81,592 employees working for it worldwide. 

A Brief Introduction

Philips is a multinational conglomerate mainly known for the production of audiovisual equipment and lighting. Gerard Philips and his father Frederik Philips founded the company on 15 May 1891 in Eindhoven, Netherlands. The company started as the manufacturer of the light bulb, but today its product list also includes a vast range of lighting products (including smart lights and home systems), audio products (wireless speakers, DJ mixers, Radio systems, hi-fi systems, headphones, etc.) as well as healthcare products (clinical informatics, imaging systems, diagnostic monitoring, etc.).

Philips
Image Source: channelnews.com.au

The Establishment of Philips

Gerard and his father Frederik started the Company in an empty factory building in Eindhoven in 1981, beginning with manufacturing the carbon-filament lamps and other electro-technical products. Though the two founders had high hopes with the company, they were unable to get a hold of the market. In 1895, Gerard’s younger brother, Anton, who was also an engineer, joined the company as a sales representative. The addition of Anton helped the company to get on the right track, and it started to grow.

By 1908, the Philips brothers had established the Philips Metaalgloeilampfabriek N.V. (Philips Metal Filament Lamp Factory Ltd.), and in four years, they founded Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken N.V. (Philips Lightbulb Factories Ltd.)., becoming a multinational company known as Philips Corporation.

In the 20s and 30s, the company experimented with the production of vacuum tubes, the first electric razor (Philishave) of the US, and radios (Chapel). The Philips razors are still a part of the Phillip product and quite popular among people.

In the late 30s, the company also experimented with the Stirling engine to promote the sales of its radios and developed an experimental engine capable of producing 16 W of shaft power. The generator became quite popular, and the company launched many versions of it. The ‘reversed Stirling engine’ cryocooler generator is the most popular among all the Philips Stirling engines.

Anticipating the danger of the Germans in the Netherlands during World War II in 1940, Anton Phillip with his other family members moved to the US, taking most of the Company’s capital. They established the North American Philips Company as part of Philips Corporation and moved the operations of the Eindhoven factory to Netherlands Antilles to keep the business running in the Netherlands. The company’s first factory in Eindhoven was destroyed during the war. As soon as the war ended the company headquarter was moved back to Eindhoven.

The Journey Afterwards

By the end of the 1940s, The company started to produce television sets and established a record label with the name Philips Records. In 1963, the company launched the audio Compact Audio Cassette tape and brought the first combination portable radio and a cassette recorder to the market. These recorders later became hugely popular as the boom box.

In 1972, the company launched the world’s first home video cassette recorder, and with time, enhanced its capabilities accordingly. The Company also introduced the first commercial LaserDisc standard and players and partnered with Sony to launch Compact Disc in 1982. The Company also tried its hands in the development of ICs and joined forces with ASM International in 1984, forming ASML.

At the beginning of the 90s, the company saw a financial loss. As an effect of that, it renamed N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken to Philips Electronics N.V. and established a new corporate division with the name Philips Electronics North America Corp in the US. In 1997, the company headquarters was also moved to Amsterdam. The company established a manufacturing unit for its semiconductor business in Silicon Valley in 1998.

At the beginning of the 2000s, the company entered into the healthcare technology business and acquired the Optiva Corporation renaming it Philips Oral Healthcare. The next year, the company completed the acquisition of Agilent Technologies’ Healthcare Solutions Group. The same year it also partnered with LG for a joint venture LG.Philips Displays. The company in order to expand in the healthcare business acquired Lifeline Systems (2006), Ximis, Inc. (2007), Respironics, Inc. (2007), and VISICU (2008).

In 2013, the company was renamed Royal Philips N.V., and in September 2014, the company split its operations into two major divisions, i.e., healthcare and consumer lifestyle. The company became more focused on healthcare and acquired companies like Volcano Corporation (2015) and Spectranetics Corp (2017). It also completed major investments in companies like Mytonomy (2017) and DEARhealth (2019). This led to the spinning off of Philips’ lighting division and the formation of an independent public company named Philips Lighting N.V., which later in 2018 was renamed Signify N.V.

The CEO: François Adrianus van Houten

Philips CEO
Image Source: ml-eu.globenewswire.com

François Adrianus van Houten is the current CEO of Royal Philips Electronics. Houten has an old connection with the company, as he is the son of one of the board of directors of the company. He was born on 26 April 1960 in the Netherlands and completed his graduation in Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam. As soon he completed his education, he joined Philips Data Systems, and since then he has been to different major positions in the company. In November 2014, he was appointed as the CEO of Philips Semiconductors, followed by holding the position of CEO at NXP in 2008. Finally, on 1 April 2011, he became the Chief Executive Officer of Royal Philips Electronics.

Touch Surgery

Touch Surgery: Digital Innovation Empowering Medical Sciences

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Edtech is one of the booming industries today, and would you believe it if we tell you that you can also learn the complete procedure of a surgery simulated in an operating room on your smartphones? Believable enough, but most of us would have not thought of it yet, right? Medical studies are the most expensive of all and getting to see and learn the procedure for all types of surgeries is not even possible for those studying medical sciences. The same thought came into the minds of two medical residents at the Imperial College London, Jean Nehme, and Andre Chow, and they end up developing Touch Surgery.

Touch Surgery

Touch Surgery has played a vital role in transforming the medical world with the help of digital technology. It is a training app for medical students that simulate surgical procedures, validated by 19 independent peer-reviewed publications. The company Digital Surgery LTD is the parent company of Touch Surgery, having its headquarters in three major cities, i.e. London, New York City, Auckland, and Sydney. In the beginning, the company name was Kinosis and later was changed to Digital Surgery, to reflect the border scope and mission of the company.

Digital Surgery is a healthcare technology company that is using digital technology to help in making all the surgeries even safer. The app includes a near to reality simulator and AI-powered surgical video management platform, offering accurate surgical content for the doctors to enhance their skills and for the medical students to practice in the operating room.

The interactive simulator of Touch Surgery helps the medical trainees to learn the step-by-step surgical procedure and test their knowledge and skills related to medical operations, through the simulator. Most importantly, it helps in enhancing their skills of decision-making in a real-time environment. The app has also proved to be useful for patients who are about to go under surgery. They use this app to know more about their surgical procedure.

Digital Surgery tied up with Microsoft in 2018 to use Microsoft’s under development Microsoft Hololens (mixed reality smartglasses for surgery) to accomplish the company’s mission of safe surgery for all. The app includes around two hundred surgery training in seventeen different specialties and is used by many medical institutions to provide the ‘to-be doctors’ with a great learning experience. Currently, the app has got over 2 million users registered to it. The Dublin-based Irish company Medtronic, a Medtech conglomerate, acquired Touch Surgery for an amount of $500 million in 2020.

The Idea Behind Touch Surgery

Jean Nehme and Andre Chow the co-founders of Touch Surgery was still working as medical residents at the Imperial College London when they thought of the idea. Since the two were residents, they did not have the access to the resources that could help them enhance their skills as a surgeon. They realized that most of the medical students do not get to try their hands on all types of surgical procedures lacking additional experience. The only source to help them to enhance their skills was surgical simulators, but these too were too expensive to get.

This led the two to think of a cheaper and more accessible simulator for all, i.e. Touch Surgery. They discussed the idea of Touch Surgery in 2010 and founded the app in 2012. The idea was innovative and useful so, they easily got connected to many investors for their research and development work too. Today, Touch Surgery has partnered with numerous surgeons, combining their expertise and digital technology to empower the surgical community.

The Founders Touch Surgery

Jean Nehme has got an MBBS BSc MRCS MSc (Hons) and specializes in plastic surgery. Nehme is an awardee of multiple awards for his research work in innovation and his contribution to digitizing medical education. He has been named as one of the most influential 500 people in the UK by Debrett. On the other hand, Andre Chow is a general surgeon.

Touch Surgery Founders
Touch Surgery Founders: Andre Chow and Jean Nehme
Image Source: balderton.com

Both the co-founders graduated from the Imperial College School of Medicine in London. During the time, the two thought of developing Touch Surgery, Chow was pursuing a Ph.D. in Stem Cells and Biotechnology. Currently, Jean Nehme is working as the CEO, and Andre Chow is working as the COO of Touch Surgery.