PicnicHealth raises $35M funding to put patients in control of their health by collecting, digitizing, and encrypting their medical records

PicnicHealth, a San Francisco-based healthtech startup that makes medical records easy to access by using data to power the next frontier of medical research, has raised $35 million in equity financing to accelerate medical research based on real-World data. The round includes a new $25 million Series B led by Felicis Ventures and a previously-unannounced $10 million Series A led by Amplify Partners in 2018. Amplify also participated in the Series B.

Founded in 2014 by Noga Leviner and Troy Astorino, PicnicHealth was founded to help patients with chronic or complex illnesses gain control of their medical records so they can more effectively navigate their healthcare journeys. To date, PicnicHealth has helped tens of thousands of patients by porting their records from any doctor or EMR in the United States into a single, secure online account.

PicnicHealth works directly with patients to give them the only tool anywhere that truly provides all of their medical records from any doctor or healthcare system in the US—in an easy-to-use, secure online dashboard. Not only that, but patients can choose to contribute their data to scientific research, which helps life sciences researchers accelerate breakthroughs in care.

Researchers then use this anonymized “real-world data” to understand how diseases are experienced by patients and treated by clinicians in the real world, going beyond the highly controlled setting of clinical trials. The goal is to create better treatments that can ultimately improve outcomes for patients.

“Our mission at Felicis is to invest in companies that reinvent critical markets such as healthcare research,” said Sundeep Peechu. “PicnicHealth embodies this approach, as it is poised to make a massive impact on our ability to treat chronic disease.”

In July, PicnicHealth announced the launch of the PicnicHealth Research Platform, which allows patients to give consent to share their de-identified data with researchers. PicnicHealth is able to provide uniquely rich data for research because it works directly with patients and has a scalable data structuring pipeline built on human-in-the-loop machine learning. The result is the first fully patient-consented real-world data set that gives a complete view of each patient’s journey over time and across all of their different medical providers.

“PicnicHealth started as a way to give patients more control navigating their own care,” said Noga Leviner, CEO PicnicHealth, who founded PicnicHealth after managing a Crohn’s disease diagnosis. “We quickly realized we were actually solving a much bigger problem by turning each patient’s messy, dispersed data into structured data. The result not only helps patients directly but it also really moves the needle on research.”