San Diego’s Accumetrics Raises $16.5M in Fifth Round of Venture Funding

Loyalty has its rewards, and in the case of San Diego’s Accumetrics, that means the company’s existing investors have just completed a fifth round of venture funding—putting another $16.5 million into the medical diagnostics company.

The Series E funding brings Accumetrics’ overall investment close to $68 million, although, as I explained in June, that includes a false start after founder Robert Hillman re-acquired the company five years after he started it. The company has been re-energized further since Timothy Still was named CEO last year.

Still sees a potential multibillion-dollar market for the company’s VerifyNow system, a blood-assay device that helps doctors quickly calibrate the right dosage for the most widely used anti-clotting drugs, including aspirin, clopidogrel (Plavix), prasugrel (Effient), and others. Because patients respond to antiplatelet medications differently, Accumetrics says doctors can use the automated diagnostic device in a quick blood test to measure a patient’s individual response to an anti-clotting drug.

Of course, it also helps to have backing from an investment syndicate that includes such prominent healthcare venture firms as Essex Woodlands Health Ventures and Kaiser Permanente Ventures. Accumetrics’ chairman Tony Arnerich, whose firm Arnerich Massena is the company’s largest investor, says in a statement released by Accumetrics, “We view the VerifyNow platform as a breakthrough technology in one of the most important remaining areas of cardio-diagnostics.” Two other firms, BBT Fund/Apothecary Capital, and RiverVest Venture Partners also returned to invest in the current round, which is expected to fully finance the company into 2011.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.