Meddik, BodyMedia Announce Recent Fundings

Meddik, a startup still in its beginning stages, announced on May 24th that it has raised $750K in seed funding. Meddik is basically a system where people can easily search for health information and receive support. Consumers can asks questions and get answers from others. Meddick believes that “we’re all connected by our health experiences — when we get sick, when we’re injured, or when we care for a loved one.” This startup allows users to share these experiences to help others, as well as find help themselves.

There was quite a few contributors to the $750K that was raised. The people and companies that donated money included: Chris Dixon, Nat Turner, Zach Weinberg, Bob Stern, Vivek Garipalli, Collaborative Fund, Founder Collective, Great Oaks, and Silicon Badia.

According to Co-founder Tim Soo, Meddik originally was supposed to be a Google Search engine for health. However, Soo, and fellow Co-founder Ben Shyong, decided that their “scope was too wide” and scaled it down. The launch is set for later this summer.

Wearable body sensors are becoming more popular, thus, the number of companies developing and releasing them is increasing. BodyMedia is one of these companies and recently raised a $12 million funding round that was led by Comcast Ventures. This is a new investment for Comcast Ventures. Draper Fisher, Jurvetson, ePlanet, Draper Triangle Ventures, Ascension Health Ventures, and InCube Ventures were among other investors from this round.

BodyMedia has a variety of products, the most recent being BodyMedia FIT, which is an on-body monitoring system. It tracks the users’ activity level, but as a result of this funding, the company plans to expand its functions and other products to help with chronic diseases, remote elder care, and sleep disorders. Christine Robins, CEO of the company, said concerning the development of these new products:

The emerging convergence of healthcare, technology and consumerism provides an ideal launching pad for us to build on that heritage by introducing new body monitoring solutions tailored to managing a much broader range of health issues.

The company launched in 1999. Before this $12 million funding round, BodyMedia had raised $37 million over the years. BodyMedia also received federal funding because of the company’s work on diabetes prevention. Altogether, $49 million has been raised by the company.

About the author

Katie Clark

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

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