Happy Health, a health platform for at-home monitoring, announced Tuesday that it raised $75 million to support the transition to home-based care.
The Texas-based company offers an FDA-cleared smart ring for at-home diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea. It also provides treatment management and daily sleep health measurements. Happy Health’s platform uses continuous health data and AI to create a personalized baseline for each patient, helping doctors identify meaningful changes in their health. Sleep is the company’s first focus area, but it plans to expand into other areas in the future.
“Our bigger vision is precision diagnostics that live on your finger and enable care across many conditions from the comfort of patients’ home,” said Dr. Dustin Freckleton, founder and CEO of Happy Health.
The $75 million round was from ARCH Venture Partners and OpenLoop. The financing will help Happy Health accelerate the clinical validation of its tech, as well as build the infrastructure to expand beyond sleep, Freckleton told MedCity News.
Happy Health is supporting the shift toward more proactive care, according to ARCH Venture Partners.
“For decades, healthcare has waited until people are already sick to act,” said Paul Berns of ARCH Venture Partners in a statement. “Happy Health is showing that many diagnoses may never need to happen inside a hospital at all. By combining continuous physiological monitoring with physician-guided care, they’re proving what care can look like when it moves into the home.”
Currently, the healthcare system is organized around episodic visits, often discovering chronic diseases too late, according to Freckleton. Sleep apnea is an example of this.
“It’s a pervasive health disorder that amplifies nearly every serious downstream condition: cardiovascular disease, stroke, AFib, all-cause mortality,” he said. “There’s one sleep doctor for every 43,000 Americans, and a 3-4 month wait to get into a clinic. So 80% of people who have it don’t know it. There are many treatment options available for sleep apnea, which will in turn mitigate development of other chronic conditions, but you can’t get care if you aren’t diagnosed.”
Freckleton has experienced these issues firsthand. He had a stroke at the age of 24 and didn’t receive a diagnosis for sleep apnea for another seven years, despite it being a common stroke risk factor.
Happy Health isn’t the only company offering a wearable ring that tracks sleep. Oura also offers a ring that provides users with insights into their sleep and other health metrics, but unlike Happy Health’s ring, Oura’s is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose medical conditions.
Ultimately, Happy Health aims to “enable continuous monitoring at home so we can detect disease earlier and give physicians the opportunity to intervene before conditions become more serious,” Freckleton said.
Photo: Richard Drury, Getty Images
