Earlier this month, MediSafe, a medication app won Qualcomm Ventures’ fourth annual QPrize, and Global Corporate Venturing caught up with the two of their team attending the awards ceremony in Sausalito, California. They were speaking on the fringes of Bloomberg’s Next Big Thing Summit fresh from being handed a giant cheque on-stage for $150,000 by Qualcomm Ventures’ head Nagraj Kashyap. Qualcomm Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the semiconductor company, screened 1200 companies. This was part of more than $1m of prize money given to all start-ups, and MediSafe received an additional $100,000 for winning its Israel region prize.
MediSafe is attempting to use the traction from its prize win to raise a $4m to $6m round. Yossi Bahagon, a Medisafe managing director said: ”We go now into our A round. This is the short term challenge. We have very strong investors until now and we are looking for strategic partnerships like with Qualcomm. The second thing is in launching our user database. We have nearly 650,000 users and growing. We have got to these numbers in less than a year. Hopefully next year we will double to quadruple that.”
The business believes its medication management platform can increase significantly how often patients regularly take their medicine. Yaara Grinberg Dana, MediSafe’s vice-president of partnerships, said: “The statistics are that chronic patients take only 50% of their medications. For people using MediSafe, the average adherence rate is 86%. We manage to do that through a support system which includes family, friends and caregivers, really getting the whole healthcare ecosystem to talk to one another when it comes to medication management.”
Given that typically it is younger people which are digitally native, the business’s customers are generally from that demographic, but this is not holding it back. Grinberg Dana said: “Our user base is between 18 to 55 in ages. It is a sad statistic but younger people are becoming chronically ill with diseases such as Chrone’s, diabetes, and facing cholesterol problems. So our user base is actually younger people. What we are seeing now is children who are 40 years old and older are engaging their parents, the older population to use MediSafe, and teaching them how to use it. “
Other regional winners of the QPrize which competed with MediSafe in California for the global prize, were Cambridge Wowo (China), a speech recognition company, Carffeine (Korea) a platform for car mechanics, Hand Talk (Latin America), a sign language machine translation platform, Konotor (India), an app engagement platform, Swift Navigation (North America), a high accuracy GPS for machines company, and Viewsy (Europe), a location analytics platform for retailers.
The entrepreneurs generally were a lively group and many of them mentioned they were staying on in California to capitalise on their QPrize wins.