KenSci, a Seattle-based digital health startup building the world’s first vertically integrated machine learning platform for healthcare has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding led by Ignition Partners with participation from Osage University Partners and Mindset Ventures. The company plans to utilize the funding to scale its machine learning platform for predictive risk management and expand operations to support the company’s rapidly growing customer base.
Incubated at the University of Washington (UW) Tacoma, KenSci was spun out in 2015 after more than four years of research and industry-academic collaboration. KenSci’s healthcare data platform and machine learning-powered applications are built collaboratively with practicing physicians, data scientists, machine learning developers and computing and biomedical researchers. KenSci is uniquely engineered to predict clinical risk, financial risk and operational risk, enabling health systems to transition to value-based care.
As healthcare shifts to a value-based model, payers and providers are increasingly under pressure to proactively bend the risk curve in population health by transitioning to a preventive healthcare model. Physicians, care managers and CMIOs leverage KenSci to intervene early, redesign care pathways and optimize population health across the care continuum.
KenSci’s machine learning platform and solutions help health systems answer the hard questions regarding who might get sick, how sick they might get, what can be done about it and how care can be optimized for cost and outcome. Finance and actuarial teams rely on KenSci to predict utilization, optimize resource allocation and detect fraud, waste, and abuse throughout the revenue cycle.
“The challenge in healthcare analytics is not in the lack of data but in the ability to connect and combine data meaningfully to unearth patterns and predict risks. Legacy systems of records have created walled gardens, unwittingly causing poor health outcomes and creating an upward spiral in healthcare costs,” said Samir Manjure, CEO and co-founder of KenSci. “We are engineering a system of insight, on top of these legacy systems, to help enable our customers to predict and intervene ahead of time rather than drive looking backward. As our customers have come to trust us with their advanced data science needs, they are asking us for more machine learning solutions and more integrations. This investment will help us serve them better across the care and cost spectrum, enabling them to fight death with data science.”