Glooko Raises $3.5M To Connect Glucose Meters To iPhones For Tracking Diabetes

Glooko, the developer of a unique hardware device and mobile app solution for people with diabetes, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership, with participation from existing investors, including Bill Campbell, Vint Cerf, Judy Estrin and Andy Hertzfeld, Venky Harinarayan, Russell Hirsch and Xtreme Labs. Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and Managing Partner of The Social+Capital Partnership will be joining Glooko’s board.

Launched last year, Glooko is a digital logbook for people with diabetes who have to check their blood sugar every day. There are dozens of glucose logbooks in iTunes, but almost all of them require manual entry. What makes Glooko different is that the company designed a $40 cable (sold separately) that works with seven of the top glucose meters. You just plug it into both devices and it downloads your daily readings.

The app itself is free. The digital log book allows users to review daily blood sugar levels, annotate them and share the results with their physician. It lets you mark whether the reading was done before or after a meal, add notes, and email or fax a 14-day summary to your doctor. The company charges for the cable.

Glooko today released a new version of the Glooko Logbook app that supports the Bayer’s Breeze 2 meter, including a real-time food database, a 30-day logbook, and provides availability in Canada.

There are currently 25 million people living with diabetes in the U.S. today, and Yogen Dalal, Glooko co-founder and chairman, said that people with blood sugar meters couldn’t do anything but read results on the meter itself, making logging results a visualizing this data cumbersome. While there have been a number of digital readers that have emerged on the market over the past year which plug into smartphones, the beauty of Glooko is that it works with the top seven devices on the market. So users don’t need to purchase and learn how to use a whole new measurement device.

“Proactive and ongoing self-management of one’s health can now be a reality using mobile devices and well-designed software,” said Palihapitiya. “Glooko has made important progress in helping individuals better manage one of the most pervasive diseases of our generation.”

There is also future potential in actually analyzing the data collected from users. Parsing and plotting these data points on a graph requires FDA clearance, explains Dalal.

Dalal says Glooko currently has 1,000 plus users, and the response has been overwhlemingly positive. He adds that Android integration is on the horizon. The new funding will be used to expand to other platforms and for user acquisition.