The Venture Codex

Participated · Series A · Sep 2021

Astarte Medical develops NICUtrition®, an EMR-integrated clinical decision support platform that standardizes feeding, optimizes nutrition, and assesses equitable care in neonatal intensive care units. The company applies software and predictive analytics to address malnutrition, suboptimal growth, and racial disparities in NICU care during the first 1,000 days. Astarte has signed contracts and has implementations underway at its initial NICU sites. The company announced a $7.6 million Series A-1 financing to support growth. Management says the funds will be used to scale sales of NICUtrition and expand customer adoption. Wendy Slatery joined the board to provide commercial and market-entry guidance. Astarte Medical is a precision medicine company based in Yardley, Pa., that uses software and predictive analytics to improve outcomes during the first 1,000 days of life, with an initial focus on preterm infants. Its first two solutions, NICUtrition Analytics and NICUtrition Guidance, support feeding protocols, decision-making and nutrition optimization in the neonatal ICU, and include digital tools and diagnostics to standardize feeding and quantify gut health. Led by CEO and co-founder Tracy Warren, the company plans to grow its team by 300% in 2020, adding in-house sales, marketing and client support to assist early adopters. It also intends to expand its engineering and data science teams to support continued product development. Astarte will use the new financing to accelerate hiring and ramp sales and marketing for its NICUtrition products, develop a regulatory strategy in support of a 2020 MAGI trial, and build a health disparities platform. The company additionally plans to explore and isolate novel therapeutic and diagnostic candidates. Astarte Medical develops NICUtrition®, a suite of digital tools and diagnostics that support feeding protocols, decision-making and practice in the neonatal ICU. The platform is designed to standardize feeding, optimize nutrition and quantify gut health for preterm infants. Core to Astarte’s product is a proprietary dataset that integrates feeding protocols, microbial profiles and clinical information to enable predictive analytics. The company focuses on improving outcomes during the first 1,000 days of life, with an initial emphasis on premature infants. Astarte recently graduated from the Illumina Accelerator and is led by CEO and co-founder Tracy Warren. The company is based in Yardley, Pa., and will use the Series A proceeds to complete development of the NICUtrition suite. Astarte Medical develops software to support care of preterm infants by providing quantitative data about gut health to enable personalized care and nutrition. Its first product, NICUtrition Guidance, is a rules engine designed to standardize enteral feeding for preterm infants. The company plans to develop MAGI, a gut-health score intended to improve growth and development of preemies while lowering medical treatment costs. Astarte was co-founded by Tracy Warren, Tammi Jantzen, and Katherine Gregory and is based in Yardley, PA. The company has received an investment from Next Act Fund and is currently raising money to launch and support NICUtrition Guidance. The amount of the investment disclosed in the article was not provided.

Led · Series A · Jul 2018

SentryHealth (formerly Edumedics) provides workplace health services delivered at the worksite, near-site clinics, or remotely via telehealth, using mid-level practitioners and a proactive, programmatic outreach model. Its proprietary Healthward platform uses algorithms and program elements to identify members with chronic diseases or at risk, orchestrate outreach and ensure adherence to evidence-based clinical protocols. The company says its approach yields industry-best participation rates and recent quarterly results showing client savings exceeding 40% among program participants with chronic diseases, driving consistent double-digit cost reductions. SentryHealth positions itself between primary care and employer health program offerings to improve outcomes for employees with chronic conditions. The company was founded in 2010 by Alice Shade and Dr. Richard Goldstein and is based in Louisville, Kentucky. It plans to use new growth capital to accelerate expansion into states beyond its core Midwest populations. Edumedics delivers care management for individuals with or trending toward diabetes and other chronic conditions, focusing on populations such as self-insured employers and Medicare Advantage groups. The company puts Nurse Practitioners face-to-face with patients and uses its proprietary Healthward™ technology at the point of care. Over four years the delivery model has improved clinical outcomes and reduced costs—clients enrolled in programs have seen up to a 15% reduction in yearly costs, and one client saw diabetes improvement exceed 52% among the most at-risk members. Edumedics raised growth capital in a $4.2M Series A to fund expansion. The company plans to expand beyond its core populations in Kentucky and Maine to other states. It will also accelerate offerings to Medicare groups to help them achieve quality measures that impact HEDIS scores and Star ratings.