Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting increasingly sophisticated day by day in its application, with enhanced efficiency and speed at a lower cost. Every sector has been reaping benefits from AI in recent times and the healthcare industry is no exception.
Gali Health, a precision medicine startup is working to advance personalized medicine across chronic disease verticals and has announced it closed a $3 million dollar seed funding round from Tech Coast Angels San Diego, Silicon Valley investors, among several others. Other notable investors include Felicis Ventures, BOLD Capital Partners and Bob Nelson (Arch).
Local Investment
The local chapter of Tech Coast Angels said it invested in Gali Health because of the founder’s local connections and proven-track record of building successful life science ventures.
“We decided to invest in Gali Health because of its potential to become the leading precision medicine company for severe inflammatory and autoimmune conditions”, said Julian Zegelman, TCA San Diego member and deal co-lead. “We were also attracted by the impressive founding team and Dr. Kupershmidt’s connection to San Diego. He’s a UC San Diego alum and he served as Head of Product at Illumina after acquisition of his prior venture NextBio”.
Ex-Illumnia employee, Ilya Kupershmidt sold his company NextBio to the DNA sequencing pioneer Illumina back in 2013. NextBio, created a way for the biomedical community to connect and mine genetic and clinical data from millions of patients worldwide, partnering with top pharmaceutical companies nationwide.
After providing scientific and technical leadership to Illumina’s new business unit, he founded Gali Health in 2016.
Today, Gali Health offers an AI-based personalized health assistant that helps people proactively manage their health. Its “Healthomes” platform is diagnostic and is used for therapeutic discovery based on the analysis of population-level health, lifestyle and genomic information.
Helping Patients with IBD
In the United States alone, IBD affects over 3 million people and that number is growing each year, according to the company.
Gali personal health assistant is for people affected by inflammatory bowel diseases, as
existing technologies are unable to fully adapt to every patient’s diverse and complex IBD management needs.
“Our design philosophy for Gali was to create a deeply personalized experience for people with IBD. Gali understands the importance of tailored self-management and works proactively with each person to provide support on the medical, lifestyle and psychological aspects of living with a chronic disease,” said Kupershmidt, founder and CEO.
Tailored Health Solutions
Its solution enables smarter disease communities by leveraging state-of-the-art AI technology to continuously learn from both patients and healthcare providers who contribute their unique insights and experiences to Gali’s knowledge base.
Similar to other AI assistants, Gali turns insights into actionable collective intelligence while mobilizing personal health information to tailor its support to individual health journeys.
Gali was designed in partnership with prominent IBD patient advocates as part of the Gali Ambassador Program. So far, the company has established a partnership with the Northern California Chapter of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation to advance education and support in the local IBD community.
Primarily focused on its research and development Gali’s latest initiative launched in October last year, the company said its working on developing novel types of diagnostics and therapeutics of its own as well as in partnership with pharmaceutical industry leaders.
The Vision
“The market size we are going after is very large, it’s in hundreds of billions of dollars. We’re starting with inflammatory bowel disease in the U.S. where the treatment of IBD is 30 billion a year,” Kupershmidt said.
Looking ahead, the company’s goal is to grow their community to millions of patients around the world beyond IBD, targeting other chronic conditions while acquiring biological samples to sequence them.
To date, the company employs around seven staffers and is planning to raise a significant financing round from institutional investors in the near future.
“The vision for our company is to create a collection of data that hasn’t been created before. Through community driven precision medicine, activated patient communities, and with the most cutting edge sequencing genomic technologies, we have the opportunity to do something truly unprecedented,” Kupershmidt said.
