Health education startup Osmosis raised $4million in new funding to expand

Osmosis, which has over one million YouTube subscribers and 500,000 registered users for its supplemental educational medical videos, has just raised $4 million in new funding.

Created by medical students from Johns Hopkins and the former Khan Academy Health and Medicine team, the rapidly developing health platform has secured a Series A round of financing led by Felicis Ventures, known for previously investing in Fitbit, Shopify, and PluralSight, among others.

With a new investment from SEI Ventures and recurring investments from Greycroft, Coverys, FundRx, Figure 8, Social Starts, and LearnStart, the money raised in this round of funding will serve to continue expanding Osmosis’ health impressive content library of more than 1,300 videos. The aim is to reach more clinicians and caregivers and grow its partnerships from dozens to hundreds of institutions. Osmosis’s goal is to use its videos and learning platform to help educate more than a billion clinicians and caregivers by 2025.

Osmosis tries to meet an ever growing social need

Osmosis surpassed one million YouTube subscribers and 500,000 registered users last month.

In order to perceive the scale, it helps to say that, in any given year, a total of 80,000 to 90,000 students are enrolled in US medical schools, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

The company is answering a social need which is expected to grow in the next decades.  

Due to the aging population worldwide, caused mainly by baby boomers getting older and developing age specific illnesses, 35 million more healthcare professionals will need training by 2030 to satisfy demand.

Osmosis has every intention to win the bet, and make a profit from helping not only medical students and other professionals, but also family members, to learn more, faster.

Inspired by his personal experiences as an immigrant and Johns Hopkins medical student,Shiv Gaglani, Osmosis’ co-founder & CEO presented a TEDx talk, given April 30th, about his company.  In it, he describes why he left medical school to build an online alternative called Osmosis.org, a health and medical education company that produces animated videos on topics from aneurysms to Zika, viewed more than 50 million times since January 2016 worldwide. According to Gaglani, there are massive predicted nurse and primary care physician shortages. Surgeons and other specialties are also in short supply. To combat this crisis, Osmosis has already registered users in all US, Canadian, Australian, and UK medical schools, as well as confirmed users in over 1,500 other health professional schools, ranging from nursing and PA to dental and pharmacy.

Osmosis’s videos help educate students, family members, and the general public

Osmosis videos are popular. They are featured on Wikipedia, YouTube, Medscape/WebMD, the Washington Post and numerous other outlets. They are helping to educate patients, family members, and the general public in matters concerning health and caregiving.

Its learning platform gives current and future clinicians access to advanced content and features, so they are able to learn more and remember information longer.

The service also has a recommendation engine that provides video recommendations, quizzes, and flashcards, all based on course documents users can upload.

The company’s vision is “Everyone who cares for someone will learn by Osmosis.”  

“By reimagining medical education, Osmosis is addressing a critical impending global crisis: the need to develop and retrain tens of millions of healthcare professionals over the next decade to meet growing demand. With Khan Academy DNA and a deep-rooted empathy for this field, we believe this team is building the next iconic company at the intersection of health and education,” said Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner at Felicis Ventures.

Investors believe in Osmosis and its future

Osmosis’s self proclaimed mission to empower the world’s clinicians and caregivers, by making sure they have access to the best learning experience possible has allies in the finance world. Recent investors, as well as previous ones, believe in the company’s future and are putting their money where their mouth is.

“When I think about talent, I think about people first. Shiv is a groundbreaking entrepreneur. Education as a whole, specifically medical education, needs to change to alleviate the financial burdens and massive debt that’s crushing young students across America. As these same students are digitally-native, they want convenient, cost-effective and personalized tools for learning, and Osmosis provides exactly that,” said Alan Patricof, Founder and Managing Director of Greycroft.

Osmosis’s CEO is very happy about the recent funding, and feels the moment in which this happened is significant.

“We are thrilled to have the support of incredible investors like Aydin and Alan as we build the most efficient and scalable learning platform for current and future health professionals,” said co-founder and CEO, Shiv Gaglani. “It’s particularly meaningful that this investment came as we crossed our first million subscribers on YouTube and are preparing to launch the Osmosis nursing and physician assistant offerings. We’ll be able to use the funds to increase our reach within our core health professional student markets as well as expand into related allied health fields.”

Osmosis has every reason to look forward to the future and the road towards achieving its major goals: serving one billion people by 2025, sustainably growing their Care for Caregivers initiative, which aims to improve the lives of caregivers and destigmatize mental illness in the medical industry, and developing Osmosis Around the World, an interactive element which lets users see who else is learning through the platform around the world.