Originally published by Innovation Map on February 09, 2022
Houston-based Koda Health announced this month that it raised $3.5 million in its latest seed round.
The round was led by Austin-based Ecliptic Capital, which focuses on emergent and early-stage investments. Sigmas Capital, Headwater Ventures, CRCM, and a number of angel investors also participated in the round.
The funding will be used to help the digital advanced care planning company double the size of its team in the next six months.
"Koda Health helps vulnerable people navigate and communicate difficult decisions about their health care journey. So, when hiring, we look for empathetic people who are phenomenal communicators," Tatiana Fofanova, Koda co-founder and CEO, says in a statement.
The Koda team will also use the funds to expand its operations to all 50 states. According to the statement, the team plans to focus on low-resource communities and operating in different languages. When Fofanova spoke with Innovation Map in September, the platform was being used by health care systems in Houston, Texas, and Virginia.
Koda Health was born out of the TMC's Biodesign Fellowship and launched by Fofanova, Dr. Desh Mohan, and Katelin Cherry in March of 2020. The platform uses AI to help patients create advanced medical care directives and documents, such as a living will, through its proprietary machine learning approach.
The pandemic helped show the founders the demand for an accessible and conversational way to help underserved communities prepare for end of life care. According to the team, what historically has been a time consuming and expensive process, through Koda Health, takes an average of 17 minutes and is completely free of charge to the end user. It is also projected to save health care systems roughly $9,500 per patient per year.
"Most Medicare beneficiaries can't afford traditional approaches to planning for future care, like estate attorneys and direct to consumer solutions. But these are conversations and legal documents that are fundamental to navigating healthcare," Fofanova continued in the statement. "Koda bridges the clinical and legal divide to make advance care planning easily accessible to everyone."
The company was awarded a prestigious Phase I grant of $256,000 from the National Science Foundation in 2021, which was used to test the platform against phone conversations with 900 patients.
It was also named the inaugural winner of the Henry Ford Health System’s Digital Inclusion Challenge for "its potential to increase equity of access to advance care planning" in October 2021.