UK start-up Babylon, which specializes in remote health apps, has doubled its valuation in its latest funding round, raising $60 million. Babylon will use the money to create its artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare platform, aiming to help patients to diagnose their ailments via a smartphone.
According to a source, Babylon's previous investors including Hoxton Ventures, Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright and most notably, Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, founders of Deepmind, the AI group purchased by Google for $500m, are also advising the digital health startup. Babylon's app has been downloaded by over a million users and it lets people ask a chatbot a series of questions about their condition without having to visit a GP.
The medical chatbot offers feedback on the patient's symptoms and recommends a paid-for video call with a human doctor when the occasion calls. More so, the One-off call with a doctor starts at £25, while calls with a specialist cost much. Alternatively, Babylon app users can choose to pay £5 a month for a subscription to the service.
The app is currently used by 800,000 people worldwide and is being trialed by the UK's National Health Service, with a test group which involves 1.2 million people in London. Babylon suggests that 10 percent of the adult population of Rwanda which has a total population around 12 million registered with the company in its first six months of operating in that country, has already signed a deal with the government.
Now, the company wishes to improve more upon the speed and sophistication of the app's medical diagnoses with this round of funding. Chief executive of Babylon, Ali Parsa said, "We already have a machine that can diagnose the majority of primary clinical conditions, so the next step is to get clinically certified by the UK's Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, and the US Food and Drug Administration," He also added, "We will also invest heavily into predicting disease ahead of time."
