AirStrip Raises $25M to Expand into Home Health, Foreign Markets

AirStrip, a San Antonio, TX-based company integrating mobile health and IT technologies, has raised $25 million in a strategic funding round that includes new and existing investors.

In a statement, AirStrip says the capital would be used to support the continued expansion of its AirStrip ONE mobile technology platform, introduce its technology to the home health market, expand overseas, and apply analytics capabilities to the healthcare data it is collecting.

“The success of this investment round shows deep industry support and validation of the AirStrip strategic vision,” AirStrip CEO Alan Portela says in the statement. “Right now, one in six babies born in the U.S. is monitored with AirStrip, and at-risk patients were monitored 1.2 million times in 2013 alone.”

One of the new investors is San Diego’s Gary and Mary West Health Investment Fund, which previously put $4 million into Sense4Baby, a startup developing remote maternal-fetal monitoring technology that AirStrip acquired five months ago. Leerink Partners, the Boston investment bank that specializes in healthcare deals, also was a new investor in the round.

Two other new investors are both AirStrip customers: Dignity Health, a San Francisco-based not-for-profit health system, operates more than 380 hospitals, clinics, and other care centers in 20 states; and St. Joseph’s Health, based in Irvine, CA, operates 16 acute care hosptals, skilled nursing facilities, and other care centers in Texas, California, and eastern New Mexico.

In addition, AirStrip said its existing investors, which include San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker]], Menlo Park, CA-based Sequoia Capital, the Wellcome Trust (a charitable foundation based in London), and Hospital Corp of America (NYSE: [[ticker:HCA]]), also participated in the deal.

In early 2012, AirStrip disclosed a collaboration with Qualcomm Life that has been integrating AirStrip’s patient monitoring technologies with the Qualcomm Life 2net wireless health technology platform. Qualcomm also made an undisclosed strategic investment in AirStrip at that time.

In an e-mail yesterday, Portela said the company does not publicly disclose how much total capital it has raised since it was founded in 2004 as AirStrip Technologies. Portela confirmed that AirStrip’s previous funding round was almost two years ago, when the Wellcome Trust made an undisclosed investment that Dow Jones reported was at least $10 million.

The company currently has 140 employees, Portela said.

“We provide [the] ONE mobile platform and ONE mobile application, providing front-end integration from multiple data types (medical devices, EMRs [electronic medical records], video, images, secure messaging, etc.) supporting multiple care settings (acute, post-acute, and home monitoring), as well as multiple care givers (doctors, nurses, case managers, etc.),” Portela wrote.

AirStrip’s mobile technology platform works with mobile devices based on a variety of operating systems, including Apple iOS, Android, Windows 8, and others, he added. “Our concept of [mobile health] is about the mobile consumer and not the device (since we provide a seamless native experience on all form factors—phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop).

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.