Verana Health, which unlocks insights from aggregated medical data, raises $150M

Verana Health, a digital health company that leverages big data insights to enhance medical research, has raised $150 million in a series E round of funding.

The San Francisco-based company has formed exclusive data partnerships with a number of notable medical associations, including the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the American Academy of Neurology, and the American Urological Association, to aggregate and analyze anonymized patient data and expedite the development of new drugs. It also claims to work with numerous multinational pharmaceutical companies and “emerging biotechnology and biopharmaceutical companies.”

AI meets healthcare

Verana Health has two core products — the VeraQ platform, which is pitched as a health data engine that connects disparate, unfiltered healthcare data; and Qdata, which are data sets derived from VeraQ for diseases including ophthalmology, neurology, and urology. The Verana Health platform uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to “preserve the integrity of the original clinical context” of a healthcare provider’s notes and inputs — essentially, making sense of unstructured text data in electronic health records (EHRs).

Founded initially as DigiSight Technologies back in 2008, the company rebranded as Verana Health back in 2018 alongside a $30 million investment led by Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV. With a fresh $150 million in the bank, Verana Health said that it plans to double down on its product development and “expand its data footprint” through building more partnership with the medical and healthcare fraternity.

For its series E round, Verana Health has attracted a slew of big-name strategic and institutional investors, including lead backers Johnson & Johnson Innovation and Novo Growth, as well as GV, Casdin Capital, Brook Byers, the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, THVC, and Breyer Capital.