ROCHESTER, N.Y.– Casana, previously known as Heart Health Intelligence, Inc., a healthcare technology firm that is re-inventing in-home health monitoring, announced that it has secured $14 million in Series A funding, bringing the total capital raised to $16.6 Million.
The financing round was led by General Catalyst and the Outsiders Fund with participation from Bemis Manufacturing Company, the largest manufacturer of toilet seats in the world and the lead investor for Casana’s seed funding round.
Austin McChord, founder and CEO of Datto, has stepped in as CEO of Casana as part of closing the Series A funding.
Casana will use their new financing to bring to market the firm’s first product to market called The Heart Seat™. Casana plans to pursue FDA clearance to further validate the clinical grade technology built into The Heart Seat which makes it a unique IoT device for heart disease management. The company will also use the funds to accelerate their work studying the benefits of an IoT heart health device for Heart Failure patients with health systems and risk bearing organizations, including The University of Florida and The Villages Health.
McChord, who has been tinkering with technology since 3rd grade, fashioned his first data product in his parents’ basement at the age of 21, where he founded his first company. Datto is now a global company with more than 1,700 employees and a community of over 15,000 MSP partners and recently had a $4.5 billion IPO.
The Heart Seat™ that Casana is commercializing was originally developed by Founder Nicholas Conn, PhD at the Rochester Institute of Technology, to enable physicians to understand the health of their patients between doctor visits, without adding burden to their workflow. The Heart Seat™ is a cloud-connected, self-contained toilet seat-based cardiovascular monitoring system, that measures the important health parameters for assessing heart health. The Heart Seat has already been tested through multiple peer-reviewed research studies and is currently pursuing FDA clearance. By using the passive and consistent home cardiac monitoring data from The Heart Seat, doctors will have a better understanding of chronic conditions, and be able to address patient’s needs as they arise.
“Our goal is to be able to monitor a patient’s health more naturally at home, without interruption of their daily routine,” McChord said. “The toilet seat is not a tech gadget. Unlike a wearable device, you can’t take it off, forget to use it or mess it up. If we do our job right, when patients use our effortless in-home heart monitoring device, we are invisible unless their health status needs attention.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), heart disease remains the leading cause of death at the global level for the last 20 years and is now killing more people than ever before. The number of deaths from heart disease have reached nearly 9 million in 2019. The CDC estimates that Heart Failure costs the US $31B per year. With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to keep people at home and out of hospitals, the ability to monitor their health digitally and remotely has become critical to reducing the burden on the healthcare system. COVID has accelerated Cardiologists and healthcare workers need for timely, reliable and clinical grade home-based data about their patients for heart disease prevention.
“As a clinical cardiologist who has cared for hundreds of heart failure patients, I know first-hand how important it is to get a real time picture of a patients’ health in order to adjust their medical regimen and avoid future hospitalizations,” said Jeffrey Leiden, MD PhD, Chairman of the Board of Casana and Executive Chairman and former CEO and Chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals. “As medicine moves out of the doctor’s office and into the home, Casana is employing a cutting-edge, user-friendly in-home heart health monitoring device, that allows doctors and patients to monitor their cardiac health status from home on a daily basis. The Heart Seat has the potential to both improve patient outcomes with heart disease prevention and decrease the high costs of heart failure in the US.”
“The next health revolution will bring sensors into everyday objects, and Casana is doing groundbreaking work creating a new category of effortless in-home heart health monitoring, using connected sensors,” said Paul Sagan, former CEO of Akamai Technologies, Casana Board member and Senior Advisor at General Catalyst. “Casana has a very promising future in transforming patient monitoring, starting with heart disease prevention. I believe Casana’s The Heart Seat™ will help physicians gain a better understanding of a patient’s health in the comfort of their home, taking burden off the healthcare system and better serving patients.”
