Lark Health Moving Forward With $100m to Invest in R&D and Tech Integration

To help people better manage their chronic conditions, Lark Health uses a unique blend of coaching, artificial intelligence, and health monitoring, helping them to change their behavior.

Lark Health is a digital startup quickly gaining the approval of major payers. The company just scored $100 million in series D funding to further its research and development efforts. The money will also help to expand its integration of virtual care. Lark Health is also on a quest to expand into new markets.

The fledgling healthcare company benefited from the $100 million series D funding round, which was led by Deerfield Management Company. Other participants included PFM Health Sciences, IDP, Franklin Templeton, Castlepeak, King River Capital, Marvell Technology co-founder Weili Dai and Olive Tree Capital.

In total to date, the digital healthcare startup has raised $185 million in debt and equity funding.

Julia Hu, Lark Health co-founder, and CEO says the company plans to go deeper and wider with its technology. Expanding the technology’s capabilities by adding additional diseases is part of the plan moving forward. The chronic conditions that are on the top of the list are the ones that health plans spend the most money on.

Hu also said that they’re spending time with Research and Development, training their AI to be clinically equal to live nurses. The goal is for Lark’s AI technology to serve as a digital front door before patients can see a real doctor or nurse.

Lark is also expanding with the big health plan partners, investing in more integration with these health plans.

About Lark Health

Launched in 2011, Lark’s AI-driven healthcare platform has grown to include nearly 2 million people, helping them with weight loss, managing diabetes, hypertension, as well as behavioral health. These people are given connected devices used to monitor their health. That data is then used to develop individualized health insights sent through text messages.

Lark quickly scaled up from over 1 million to more than 30 million members, contracted through its health plan partners.

Ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for hands-off virtual healthcare has exploded. That drove health plans and other providers to find a seamless virtual care platform that they could easily integrate. That’s where Lark stepped into the picture.

The recent funding is a powerful validation of Lark’s ability to leverage data science and conversational AI to help payers transform how they deliver healthcare. Lark could quickly stand in as a virtual primary care experience, as well as help people manage their chronic conditions.

Lark Health is Growing

The recent funding helps to fuel the growing momentum of Lark Health. The company recently added nearly half a dozen members to its leadership team. Lark also published a study studying the engagement of people 65 years and older with its digital health platform in the journal, Frontiers of Digital Health.

The recent momentum builds on last year’s announcement of Lark’s expanding relationship with Anthem-affiliated health plans. Lark powers Anthem’s digital coaching through Anthem’s mobile app. Lark achieved the honor of Anthem’s Preferred Provider for diabetes prevention.

Lark is proud of the research that indicates that its digital diabetes prevention program effectively reaches vulnerable diabetics, keeping them healthier. After examining the data after a year of participating in Lark’s diabetes program, the research team found that participants had an average weight loss of 4.3%.

Conversational AI

Using data along with conversational AI, Lark is able to provide personalized care at a much lower cost than other services that manage chronic conditions. Other services rely on telephone calls or in-person visits for coaching.

The adoption of digital healthcare boomed as the COVID-19 pandemic drove healthcare providers to have shifted from seeing patients in person to seeing them virtually. Now, virtual healthcare platforms are seen as essential to help health plans lower costs. Health plans have especially embraced virtual care for preventative, chronic, and behavioral modification. Also, payers want integrated solutions that can use their existing clinical resources, rather than stand-alone platforms.

Lark designed its platform to easily integrate with its partner’s existing healthcare infrastructure to help them put their chronic disease prevention and management programs on automatic.

A partner at investment firm Deerfield pointed out that so far, various approaches to chronic condition management have resulted in care that people find inadequate and frustrating.

On the other hand, Lark’s powerful AI-based platform enables personalized patient engagement and digital counseling. The bottom line is, Lark Health integrates and coordinates within a payer’s existing system to drive not only improved outcomes but also lower costs.