Healthcare compliance analytics startup Protenus raised $11 million to accelerate sales and expand its technology’s abilities

Baltimore, Maryland-based startup Protenus has raised $11 million in a Series B funding round led by F-Prime Capital and Kaiser Permanente Ventures, the company said in a press release.  The company will use the investment to make its comprehensive health data auditing and privacy monitoring platform available to hospitals across North America. Founded in 2014 by Nicholas Culbertson and Robert Lord, Protenus protects patient privacy in the electronic health record (EHR) for top-ranked hospitals, using the latest big data techniques and Protenus-led advances in data science, machine learning, visualization, and software engineering.

The Protenus platform uses artificial intelligence to analyze every single action inside a medical record system. Hospitals use Protenus platform gain full insight into how their health data is used, in order to better protect it. Its platform is currently used by top health systems and academic medical centers across the country. With nearly 9 out of 10 hospitals in the U.S. having experienced health data breaches, and a new breach occurring nearly daily, Protenus growth in 2017 outpaced expectations. The $11M Series B funding round, which will accelerate sales and customer support hiring, as well as R&D to expand platform capabilities, was co-led by F-Prime Capital Partners and Kaiser Permanente Ventures, with Arthur Ventures, Lionbird Venture Capital, and Cognosante Ventures participating.

“Kaiser Permanente Ventures is dedicated to investing in innovative technology solutions that help deliver the best care possible to patients,” said Sam Brasch, Senior Managing Director at Kaiser Permanente Ventures. “We’re excited about the opportunity to partner with the fantastic team at Protenus to advance their efforts to solve meaningful problems for the healthcare community.”  Built for this new big data paradigm, Protenus is an artificial intelligence-enabled platform providing privacy teams with the ability to automatically and completely review every access to patient data. “We are passionate when we meet teams with a unique insight on a market, and the Protenus team recognized early on that the tension between the need to share health data and the inherent risk of unmonitored access to patient information would ultimately require a secure, enterprise-scale solution,” notes Jon Lim, Partner at F-Prime Capital Partners. “The company’s rapid growth to date, coupled with its impressive client roster, showed us that the nation’s leading health systems are choosing Protenus as they grapple with this problem.”

Protenus is Health IT’s next-generation immune system. Trusted by major healthcare organizations, the Protenus platform allows privacy and security teams to protect health data from misuse using clinical context, advanced analytics, and machine learning. Protenus provides accurate, timely, and actionable alerts to suspicious activity in the Electronic Health Record, thereby eliminating the need for reactive access log reviews, mitigating risk and public exposure, and enhancing trust throughout healthcare organizations. We have assembled a world-class and interdisciplinary team of innovators, engineers, designers, explorers and scientists to ensure that patient data receives the protection it deserves. Protenus has raised a total of $19.4 million in funding to date.