Google Ventures Leads $130M Series B In Cancer Data Startup Flatiron Health

Flatiron Health, a startup that organizes real-time oncology data to help cancer patients and doctors, has raised $130 million in Series B funding led by Google Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Laboratory Corporation of America, and angel investors. Part of the capital will be used to acquire Altos Solutions, an electronic medical records company.

The funding, which brings Flatiron Health’s total raised so far to $138 million, is significant for Google Ventures because it represents the firm’s largest investment so far in a medical tech startup, according to the WSJ.

Other health tech companies Google Ventures has invested in include DNAnexus, which is building a searchable archive of DNA information, Foundation Medicine, which uses big-data to analyze tumors; and hospital discharge and readmissions tracker Predilytics.

Flatiron Health was founded by Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner, who also launched Invite Media, an advertising tech platform that was acquired by Google in 2010.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Google Ventures general partner Krishna Yeshwant said,

“Cancer will likely touch all of us at some point in our lifetimes, either as a patient or as the family or friend of a patient. Flatiron has pioneered a way to learn much more about cancer, so that we can improve the way we care for patients and treat the disease. It’s rare to find a team of the caliber assembled by Flatiron Health that combines pragmatic insights from the healthcare industry with the deep technical insight of the IT industry. They are working on one of the biggest problems in healthcare, and their progress has been nothing short of stunning to date.”

Flatiron Health, which launched in 2012 and is currently in beta, collects information by connecting cancer treatment center around the world on its cloud-based technology platform, with the goal of allowing researchers, physicians, and patients to learn from aggregated data collected from millions of cases. It hopes that this will allow doctors to provide better care and enable patients to make data-driven decisions.

There are currently between 500 to 1,000 oncologists using Flatiron’s data platform, Turner told the WSJ. Acquiring Altos, which is used by 1,300 medical professionals, will give doctors access to Flatiron’s database as they enter new information into medical records.

Altos’ 60 employees will join Flatiron after the acquisition is completed, and Flatiron Health also plans to hire up to 30 more staffers, mostly engineers, by the end of this year.

Photo by Flickr user Robert Couse-Baker used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license