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It's not every week that you see a tech founder who has worked as an analytics associate at Google and as a nurse assistant at a hospital. Sean Duffy has always straddled these two worlds: his mother was a nurse and he developed a fascination for medicine, but he never could shake the fact that he was "huge tech geek."
"I was always kind of torn between tech and medicine," Duffy says. In 2011, he found a way to blend these two passions together with Omada Health, a digital healthcare startup that takes a multi-pronged approach to help prevent chronic diseases.
For the startup's first act, it focused on diabetes, or more accurately prediabetes, meaning people who have higher-than-normal blood sugar and are at risk of type 2 diabetes as well as heart disease and strokes. One third of U.S. adults were prediabetic in 2010, according to the CDC. Most are not aware of it.
Omada's team, which includes former employees from Google, Amazon and IDEO, crafted a 16-week program called Prevent, based on the major government-sponsored Diabetes Prevention Program except with more digital tools. Participants join small online groups of their peers, receive coaching from health professionals and track their progress using a pedometer and wireless scale that are supplied. The goal is to get people to lose weight in and change their behaviors.
On Wednesday, Omada announced raising a $23 million Series B round of funding led by Andressen Horowitz to expand on this diabetes prevention initiative and begin working on similar efforts for other diseases.
The areas the startup is exploring, according to Duffy, are "conditions you can make better through weight loss and lifestyle change." As of right now, Omada is looking into ways to prevent hyper-tension, high cholesterol, smoking cessation and lower back pain.
The funding is also notable for Andreessen Horowitz as it represents the prominent VC firm's first significant investment in the healthcare and biomedical space.
"If we can prove out that diabetes prevention works at scale then maybe we can get into smoking cessation or other chronic behaviors," Balaji Srinivasan, a general partner at Andreessen, who will join Omada's board of directors. "We think the potential for Omada is very large."