Digital health company Verana Health announced last week that it raised $150 million in a Series E funding round.
San Francisco-based Verana Health’s Series E round was led by Johnson & Johnson Innovation (JJDC) and Novo Growth, the growth-stage investment arm of Novo Nordisk.
Additional participants included existing investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), Casdin Capital and Brook Byers, while new investors, including the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, THVC and Breyer Capital joined the round, according to a news release.
Verana Health said it intends to use the proceeds from the investment to advance its life sciences product and service strategy across the drug lifecycle. In addition, the company looks to enhance its value proposition to healthcare providers in its real-world data network and expand its data footprint through medical society and strategic partnerships.
The company develops the VeraQ platform and its curated Qdata for use in ophthalmology, neurology and urology, advancing clinical trial enablement, software-as-a-service and real-world evidence. Verana also aims to expand its AI capabilities, focusing on natural language processing (NLP) to extract insights from unstructured text data in electronic health record (EHR) notes.
“We’d like to thank both our existing and new investors for partnering with us, demonstrating confidence in the foundation we’ve built through our exclusive real-world data network and our advanced population health data engine, VeraQ,” Verana Health CEO Sujay Jadhav said in the release. “We’re especially pleased to have a strong mix of investors—including growth firms, life sciences innovation funds, and academia—who recognize the momentum we’ve built in powering real-world evidence by cultivating exclusive partnerships with three specialty medical societies and collaborating with four of the top five pharmaceutical companies.”
Novo Growth Principal Dr. Jeffrey Low, along with a representative from JJDC, have joined Verana Health’s board of directors following the funding round.