Evidation Health Is Santa Barbara’s Latest Billion-Dollar Baby
On April 15, 2021, The SantaBarbara Independent reported, Imagine an app that pays you to exercise. That can detect the hidden beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease or the early warning signs of a stroke long before it strikes. That allows researchers to conduct large-scale clinical studies much faster and cheaper and gives pharmaceutical companies the knowledge they need to make better drugs.
Imagine an app that harnesses the power of mass data and machine learning, not to optimize Facebook ads for a quick buck but to build a superhighway of information that flows between individuals, doctors, and scientists so the world becomes a healthier place.
Evidation Health ― a Santa Barbara startup born nine years ago around a kitchen table on Voluntario Street ― and its accompanying app, called Achievement, is the means by which those dreams will be realized. At least that’s what some of the country’s biggest and most respected institutions and philanthropists believe.
Late last month, Evidation announced it raised $153 million in venture capital from Kaiser Permanente and a private equity firm. That’s on top of a previous infusion of $106 million and existing working partnerships with Johnson & Johnson, the American College of Cardiology, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and others.
Today, Evidation is the largest digital health network in the United States, with more than 4.5 million people using Achievement to track and share their steps, heart rhythms, sleeping patterns, and other health indicators via wearable devices like Fitbits and Apple Watches. Participants receive reward points that they can convert into cash or donations to charities of their choosing. They can also opt into anonymous studies or answer questionnaires for even more rewards.
But it was this latest round of funding that officially metamorphosed Evidation into a “unicorn” ― that rare breed of private company valued at $1 billion or more. It got a write-up in Bloomberg. European wire services picked up the news. People far and wide took notice. Especially locally. Only a handful of South Coast businesses ― Procore, AppFolio, Apeel, and a few others ― have achieved such coveted status.
To learn more about this rising tech giant in our midst, we spoke with its creators, a pair of computer prodigies from Europe who could have lived and worked anywhere in the world but chose to make Santa Barbara their home. In fact, they say, the city has been critical to their success. They employ 50 people out of their recently renovated office on Figueroa Street, and with the new capital, they are looking to hire 50 more.
To read the full article click HERE
