Healthcare
See the presentation that got a healthtech startup $7 million from Khosla Ventures to help patients find new treatments using AI
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- Eureka Health is building a platform to help patients with chronic conditions find new treatments.
- The startup has thousands of patient reports for conditions including long COVID and obesity.
- Eureka Health used this 11-slide pitch deck to land $7 million in a round led by Khosla Ventures.
Both of Eureka Health’s cofounders, Zain Memon and Noah MacCallum, have family members who were diagnosed with chronic conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of MacCallum’s siblings was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; the other was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Memon’s mother was diagnosed with multiple-system atrophy, a disease similar to Parkinson’s disease. All three cases had one thing in common: The diagnoses forced patients to become experts in their own conditions and to advocate for themselves when their providers wouldn’t.
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Based on these experiences, Memon and MacCallum initially wanted to build online communities for those with conditions similar to the ones their family members had. But they ultimately decided to start Eureka Health in 2021, focusing on long COVID as they saw the disease affecting millions around the world.
“All the issues we observed for chronic disease were turned to 10, in terms of doctors being dismissive, there being no cures, and people being really active on these online communities,” MacCallum told Insider.
Eureka Health seeks to give patients with chronic conditions a community to find new treatments based on reports of what other patients have tried. The company calls it “Yelp for treatments.”
Eureka Health grabbed $7 million in seed funding in July led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from South Park Commons, Bling Capital, SciFi VC, Able Partners, and Bow Capital, as well as angel investors such as the cofounder of 23andMe, Anne Wojcicki; and YouTube’s former CEO, Susan Wojcicki. Eureka previously raised $400,000 from South Park Commons through its founder-fellowship program.
For a given condition, Eureka’s employees create a database of treatments manually, which the startup’s medical-advisory board informs.
Then, Eureka patients can log how effective a specific treatment was for their symptoms, as well as any side effects they may have experienced. Those reports help build an idea of the average effectiveness and the side-effect profiles of the treatments on Eureka’s site.
Patients can also log their own treatments if Eureka doesn’t already list them. The team gets notified of any new treatments and reviews them to address any potential safety or health concerns.
“We’re not making claims, we’re not overselling treatment data or efficacy,” MacCallum said. “We’re saying, here are a bunch of patient experiences, and based on those experiences, here are the benefits and side effects. Whatever patients are trying is generally welcome for other patients to learn from, with important exceptions.”
Eureka Health provided Insider with the deck it used to raise $7 million in seed funding. The startup removed confidential information about its user numbers, growth targets, and proprietary technology before sharing it with Insider.
Eureka Health came out of stealth in July with funds to create communities for those with chronic conditions and power chronic-condition research.
Eureka set out to build communities on its site for conditions without a cure and with lots of unknowns, according to its cofounders. Patients with those conditions often scour the internet for advice.
Eureka’s platform helps narrow down which treatments may be most effective for you with features including AI-created scores that compare how similar another Eureka user’s condition is to yours based on inputs such as demographics data and reported symptoms.
Eureka patients can look at the profiles of other users with high similarity scores to see what treatments worked for them or browse Eureka’s communities for the best treatments to address specific symptoms.
While Eureka’s team inputs treatments manually, the company also uses large language models to pull posts from Reddit and other online forums to augment reports on a given treatment with more information on its potential effectiveness and side effects.
A few thousand people use Eureka’s platform, according to the company. Aside from long COVID, Eureka has built communities for conditions including POTS, dysautonomia, migraines, and autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s and multiple sclerosis.
Memon and MacCallum emphasized their commitment to patient-data privacy and transparency about what data may be shared. Patients can choose not to make their profiles public to other users and can decline to contribute to research efforts down the line, Memon said.
Eureka wants to build a research hub where patients can share data about their conditions with pharmaceutical companies and other players, Memon said. He added that those partnerships could become a source of revenue for Eureka.
The cofounders said they’re excited to use AI to add more sources to Eureka’s site beyond patient reports, such as clinical research and expert reports.
Eureka’s team includes eight people, and the startup’s cash-burn rate is very low, Memon said. He added that the funding from Khosla Ventures will support Eureka’s efforts to build more conditions into its platform over multiple years.
Eureka has also built spaces for metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. The company wants to collect patient-reported data on new weight-loss drugs, including Ozempic and Wegovy, including which weight-loss medications might be most effective for certain patients.