Following a Series B and strategic acquisition, higi is expanding its health data solutions

by Andreas Rekdal
March 29, 2017

If you're a healthtech company on the lookout for strategic investors, you can't do much better than one of the country's largest insurance providers.

Higi announced on Wednesday that it has raised a Series B investment from BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners. The company also announced that it has acquired EveryMove, a Seattle-based health and wellness startup that lets employers offer incentives to promote healthy lifestyle choices.

“This investment along with the integration of EveryMove further extends higi’s leadership in enabling population health and our ability to help our payer, provider, retail and brand customers to drive behavior change, cost savings, and improved health,” said CEO Jeff Bennett in a statement.

The terms surrounding the deal were not disclosed, but the round follows $40 million Series A raised in January 2016.

Bennett said the company currently employs around 100 people, with more than 50 employees working out of higi's Chicago headquarters. The company plans to expand its team, including in Chicago.

Best known for its health stations, located inside 11,000 retail locations around the country, higi said the investment and acquisition will accelerate its strategy to “create the most extensive set of tools to transform population health activities.”

In addition to its health stations, higi also offers a HIPAA-compliant wellness solution that integrates data from those locations as well as from 80 different devices, wearables and apps. Using that data, higi gives users an activity score that indicates how users are progressing toward their wellness goals.

Higi said its in-store stations alone have been used by more than 36 million unique users to conduct 200 million biometric screenings covering blood pressure, pulse, weight and body mass index.

“higi is the only network we have seen that has demonstrated an ability to integrate into the normal workflow of the consumer, whether at the retailer, the pharmacy or on their mobile phone,” said Anna Haghgooie, an advisor to BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, in a statement.

Bennett said the acquisition and the funding round both emerged from a partnership with EveryMove.

"As we started discussing how we could close some of their gaps around biometric screening ... we started discussing whether we should just bring the companies together," said Bennett. "We [brought that plan] to their investors, which included BlueCross BlueShield."

Image via higi.

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