What You Should Know:
– Casana raises $14M in Series A funding to pursue FDA clearance for its an IoT heart health toilet seat that captures clinically relevant measurements, including heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation, and cardiac output.
Casana, previously known as Heart Health Intelligence, Inc., a healthcare technology firm that is re-inventing in-home health monitoring, today announced that it has raised $14M in Series A funding, bringing the total capital raised to $16.6M. The Series A round was led by General Catalyst and the Outsiders Fund with participation from Bemis Manufacturing Company, the largest manufacturer of toilet seats in the world and the lead investor for Casana’s seed funding round. Casana will use their new financing to bring to market the firm’s first product to market called The Heart Seat.
Founded in 2018 by Dr. Nicholas Conn, Casana’s mission is to assist medical teams in their care management of patients with chronic conditions beyond the four walls of the hospital, starting with the 6M+ people in the US living with Heart Failure. Casana is unlocking a new category in healthcare technologies that enable effortless, integrated and consistent in-home heart health monitoring. Casana’s first product, The Heart Seat™ is an IoT heart health toilet seat that captures clinically relevant measurements, including heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation, and cardiac output.
The Heart Seat
The Heart Seat™ that Casana is commercializing was originally developed by Founder Nicholas Conn, PhD at the Rochester Institute of Technology, to enable physicians to understand the health of their patients between doctor visits, without adding burden to their workflow. The Heart Seat™ is a cloud-connected, self-contained toilet seat-based cardiovascular monitoring system, that measures the important health parameters for assessing heart health.
The Heart Seat has already been tested through multiple peer-reviewed research studies and is currently pursuing FDA clearance. By using the passive and consistent home cardiac monitoring data from The Heart Seat, doctors will have a better understanding of chronic conditions, and be able to address patient’s needs as they arise.
Expansion Plans
Casana plans to pursue FDA clearance to further validate the clinical grade technology built into The Heart Seat. The company will also use the funds to accelerate their work studying the benefits of an IoT heart health device for Heart Failure patients with health systems and risk bearing organizations, including The University of Florida and The Villages Health.
Appoints New CEO
In addition to the funding announcement, Austin McChord, founder and CEO of Datto, has stepped in as CEO of Casana. McChord, who has been tinkering with technology since 3rd grade, fashioned his first data product in his parents’ basement at the age of 21, where he founded his first company. Datto is now a global company with more than 1,700 employees and a community of over 15,000 MSP partners and recently had a $4.5 billion IPO.
“Our goal is to be able to monitor a patient’s health more naturally at home, without interruption of their daily routine,” McChord said. “The toilet seat is not a tech gadget. Unlike a wearable device, you can’t take it off, forget to use it or mess it up. If we do our job right, when patients use our effortless in-home heart monitoring device, we are invisible unless their health status needs attention.”
