juli secures $3.8 million for AI-powered platform to help manage chronic conditions
juli, the AI-powered digital health platform empowering patients and their care teams to manage complex chronic conditions, announced it has secured $3.8 million in a seed funding round. Leading the round were Speedinvest, one of Europe’s most active early-stage venture capital firms, and Norrsken VC, a fund investing in start-ups solving the world's biggest problems while building massive businesses.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund Emerge Program and Dieter Von Holtzbrinck Ventures also joined the financing round.
With a vision rooted in improving care for chronic conditions, the financing will enable juli to scale its commercial team across the U.S., conduct clinical trials of the app, and acquire additional artificial intelligence talent.
“juli is helping patients, providers and employers identify behavioral triggers that worsen or improve the most hard-to-treat and complex chronic conditions, including asthma, migraines, depression and bipolar disorder,” said Bettina Hein, CEO and co-founder of Boston-based juli. “With the support of Speedinvest, Norrsken and our other investors, we will be able to expand our reach to improve patient health and lower health care costs.”
Chronic and mental health conditions account for 90% of U.S. healthcare expenditures. juli harnesses AI to help patients (and their caregivers) gain control over their conditions by giving them powerful insight into the behavioral patterns that impact their health, like pinpointing triggers that make a complex, multifactorial condition worse, and identifying changes that can help avoid or alleviate a flare-up.
Since launching a year ago, approximately 15,000 patients have used the juli app to track data for chronic, debilitating conditions. The company has already earned high-profile awards including Best New Company of 2021 by MassTLC, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as one of 15 digital health startups to join the 2022 PandemicX Accelerator cohort, and is one of only nine companies selected into SoftBank Vision Fund’s Emerge Program for 2021.
Hein, a serial software entrepreneur who has previously built successful technology companies, co-founded juli with Bettina Duehrkoop, a Swiss entrepreneur and Chief Marketing Officer of juli.
“Chronic conditions are increasingly affecting a larger number of people, and putting huge pressure on healthcare systems,” said Tove Larrson, General Partner at Norrsken VC. “We urgently need better tools to manage these conditions, and available technology must be leveraged to ensure wider access to management tools. By gathering data from various sources, and monitoring patterns and triggers using its intelligent AI powered system, juli enables patients to live better lives, and helps to alleviate the pressure on healthcare systems. We look forward to working together with the juli team to tackle this massive challenge.”
"It is often experienced founders with a fresh perspective who manage to innovate where others just rely on the status quo,” said Michael Schuster, General Partner at Speedinvest. “The juli team brings so much experience from so many different fields to the table - especially their in-depth experience and expertise in working with data - that I am convinced they‘ll shake up digital healthcare for good!“
