Blockchain Health Tech Company Launches with $3.5 Million Seed

Curisium, a new healthcare technology that builds blockchain-based contracting technology for payers, providers, and life sciences companies, officially launched today with the announcement that it has secured $3.5 million in seed funding.

The funding came from Sanofi Ventures, Shuttle Fund, Green Bay Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and Flare Capital Partners. Flare co-founder Bill Geary and NEA Head of Healthcare Services Mohamed Makhzoumi have been named to Curisium’s board of directors. Representatives

Peter Kim, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said that the spread of value-based contracts has been hampered by logistics costs, lack of trust, and the difficulty of verifying outcomes. Blockchain, Curisium believes, can be the solution.

"Curisium's platform, by enabling outcome verification at the patient level, while automating the payment side, has the potential to rapidly accelerate the breadth and depth of innovative contracting arrangements," Geary said in a statement.

Based in Manhattan Beach, California, Curisium was founded only 3 months ago in September, 2017 according to the LinkedIn pages of Kim and his co-founder, Francis Lam. The pair previously worked together at New York-based healthcare analytics company Aetion, and at equity firm Roc Capital before that.

The company says its technology allows for dynamic patient-level contracts that provide for population-level statistical analysis while increasing specificity. Ensuring safe transfer of outcomes data can encourage and improve reporting protocols. According to its website, the platform employs a “strong cryptographic” to ensure security and replaces legacy payment systems with an integrated, automated solution.

"With the Curisium platform, we now have a trusted version of health records that will get better over time, and the industry can finally start to discover, maintain and improve patient health," Sanofi’s Chief Data Officer Milind Kamkolkar said.

"We are thrilled to partner with the Curisium team as they pioneer blockchain for healthcare in a pragmatic, market-driven way, that addresses pain points across trust, security, and payment logistics," NEA’s Makhzoumi said, calling blockchain’s potential for healthcare “tremendous.”

The technology has been touted as a possible solution for multiple problems in healthcare, ranging from collaborative machine learning projects to interoperability shortcomings.