What You Should Know:
– Ubie, a Japan-based digital health startup raises $26.2 M in Series C funding to bring unprecedented medical experience by strengthening partnerships with pharmaceutical companies in Japan and the US.
– Led by a team of talented developers and medical doctors, Ubie uses a machine-learning algorithm and offers Ubie AI Symptom Checker, allowing patients to check on their symptoms and determine the next appropriate course of action for free.
AI-Powered Symptom Checker
Ubie is a Japanese health-tech startup founded by a medical doctor and an engineer in 2017. Using AI as its core technology, the company develops and provides an AI-powered patient questionnaire that guides patients from symptoms to appropriate medical care and improves operational efficiency in the medical field. Ubie is promoting the creation of a society in which anyone can access medical care that suits them best.
Ubie is one of the few startups in the world with a medical data platform that has direct contact with both patients and medical institutions. Ubie offers two services that focus on the “medical questionnaire” as a gateway to healthcare, using AI as its core technology. The “AI-powered symptom checker,” provided for patients, asks around 20 questions about their symptoms to discover related diseases and provide more detailed actionable health information.
Ubie offers “AI-powered patient intake,” a service that streamlines the medical interview process for medical institutions. This service is based on a database of approximately 50,000 medical articles from around the world, created by more than 50 active physicians. The service has been introduced to more than 1,000 medical institutions worldwide and continues to improve the operational efficiency of these institutions. Since its launch, it has been trusted by 5 million monthly users worldwide, including in Japan and the U.S.
Expansion Plans
Ubie will aim to bring a new medical experience to Japan and the U.S. by connecting patients, medical institutions, and pharmaceutical companies through the medical data platform it is building to solve the following medical issues;
– ensuring that patients visit the right medical institution at the right time,
– ensuring that physicians can access relevant, up-to-date knowledge from the vast amount of the latest information on diseases and rare diseases that are not their specialty, and,
– ensuring that pharmaceutical companies continue to provide patients with the appropriate information and scientific findings related to their conditions.
Ubie plans to use the latest round of funding to fuel business growth in Japan and the U.S. to build a medical data platform that connects patients, medical institutions, and pharmaceutical companies.
“Not only in Japan, but also in other countries, the current healthcare system is suffering from various losses due to the fragmentation of information held by patients, medical institutions, and pharmaceutical companies. This fundraising aims to accelerate collaboration with pharmaceutical companies and create an unprecedented consumer-centered medical experience utilizing Ubie’s data platform. Ubie already has business with more than 20 major pharmaceutical companies in Japan and other countries, and this brings Ubie closer to realizing its mission ‘To develop a healthcare guide for everyone,’ both in Japan and the U.S,” said Ubie Co-founder and CEO Yoshinori Abe, MD.