Why Georgian Invested in Glooko (Again)

We are pleased to announce that Georgian has led Glooko’s $100 million Series F fundraise, with participation from existing investors Health Catalyst Capital and Canaan. Georgian led the investment in Glooko through its Alignment Fund II, a vehicle designed to enable Georgian to follow-on in existing Growth Fund investments. With this round of financing, Glooko intends to bolster its core diabetes Connected Care platform through product expansion and device integrations, while delivering clinical research and chronic condition support for healthcare providers in new geographies (such as the Middle East and Asia). 

Additionally, we are pleased to welcome Mike Alvarez as Chief Executive Officer to lead Glooko through its next phase of growth. Mike brings two decades of leadership experience with multinational companies in medical devices and biotechnology, including Qardio, Medtronic, St. Jude Medical (acquired by Abbott) and Sanofi.

Glooko is an integrated digital health company that connects people with diabetes, health care providers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device partners to help improve the health outcomes of patients with chronic conditions. Glooko’s platform has been used by more than 4.4 million patients and 10,000 clinics, in over 30 countries.¹

Challenges in Diabetes Management

Diabetes is a chronic condition affecting over 537 million adults globally, and managing it requires constantly monitoring blood glucose levels, taking prescribed medications, making significant lifestyle adjustments and communicating regularly with healthcare providers. The cost of managing patients with diabetes is estimated at over $400 billion in the U.S. alone. Today, patients have access to a wide range of connected devices that automatically track their blood sugar levels and securely store the data in the cloud – a far cry from the days when patients had to manually track their blood sugar levels in notebooks.

Advancements in technology have enabled real-time monitoring through glucose meters and continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) that can sync data directly to mobile apps. These connected devices not only streamline the process but also provide patients and healthcare providers with more accurate, actionable insights to improve care.

Nevertheless, these devices are often “walled gardens” with little integration between devices and existing health platforms. With no integration, endocrinologists lack access to a patient’s full medical history and spend valuable time in-clinic documenting the patient’s medical history. Glooko offers an agnostic integration platform that seeks to improve outcomes for patients by streamlining an endocrinologist’s workflow. 

Georgian’s History with Glooko

Georgian first invested in Glooko in 2017 when it led the company’s Series C round. At the time, Glooko was focused on improving endocrinology workflows for patients with Type 1 diabetes, and developed a platform to extract, analyze and provide insights on patient data through integrations with more than 160 devices (mostly CGM devices and insulin pumps). Through its Connected Care platform, Glooko supported ~2,400 clinics in the US and had just expanded into Europe through the acquisition of its largest competitor, Diasend. In 2017, the International Diabetes Federation estimated that ~400 million patients struggled with diabetes worldwide. By 2021, that number had grown to over 500 million patients struggling with diabetes. 

Fast forwarding to 2024, Glooko has: 

• Grown its global coverage by nearly 5x to 10,000 clinics, with more than 50% penetration of endocrinology clinics in the US and 100% penetration in select European markets, such as Scandinavia. 
• Expanded its total addressable market and go-to-market motion outside of traditional endocrinology clinics to large health systems. 
• Integrated with over 200 devices, including blood glucose monitors, CGMs, insulin pens, smart scales, fitness trackers and more. 
• Launched multi-condition management functionality for comorbidities (such as obesity) and initiated expansion into primary care and support for patients with Type 2 diabetes. 
• Developed a robust roadmap of new features to continue improving efficiency and decision making support for health care providers (such as population health tools and predictive algorithms) to enable proactive care decisions and optimize resource allocation for high-risk patient cohorts. 
• Built relationships with strategic investors and critical device integration partners in the diabetes and obesity management markets, including Insulet, Novo Nordisk, Mayo Clinic, Dexcom, Samsung and Medtronic. 

In 2021, Glooko launched its Digital Life Sciences (DLS) business. The DLS business comprises three core offerings:

1. Clinical research: An FDA-compliant platform that enables connected clinical trials. The platform leverages Glooko’s Connected Care infrastructure to collect patient data and monitor trial progress remotely.   
2. Digital companions and therapeutics: “Digital companions” are software applications intended to deliver digital education about specific medications – think of these like the digital form of a physical medication pamphlet. “Digital Therapeutics” are also software applications, however they are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as they provide therapeutic guidance (such as insulin dosing recommendations) to the patient or health care provider. 
3. Real world data (RWD): Robust data sets including blood glucose, insulin, exercise, food, medications, blood pressure, weight and demographics for retrospective studies and randomized clinical studies. This RWD can be used to enable patient identification for clinical trials to accelerate enrollment and the diversity and inclusion that is required by regulatory bodies.

Today, the DLS business makes up a significant portion of Glooko’s revenue across clinical research, digital companions, additional device integrations and RWD relationships with critical life sciences partners such as Sanofi, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. 

Glooko’s Solution: A Comprehensive Digital Platform

Today, Glooko’s Connected Care platform has had over 4.4 million patients in its platform and has built one of the largest data sets of its kind, at 100+ billion data points. Furthermore, Glooko has built integrations with ~95% of health monitoring devices for diabetes, obesity and associated chronic conditions.¹ As a result, endocrinologists can better monitor and manage their patient base in a single platform. Improved measurement doesn’t just mean more efficient workflows for endocrinologists; Glooko’s platform has been shown to improve health outcomes by reducing average blood glucose and hyperglycemic events in three months by ~18% and ~12%, respectively.

Glooko believes that its rich data set can power more effective clinical trials and digital companions. Digital Life Sciences providers use Glooko’s data to design clinical trials and leverage Glooko’s platform to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of treatment, while also delivering more timely medication counseling through digital companions. Glooko has executed projects for top clinical research organizations (CROs), and these projects have helped to establish Glooko’s reputation in remote clinical trials. Additionally, Glooko has partnered with several global Life Science providers to develop bespoke digital health solutions that assist people with diabetes. 

Why We Chose to Invest in Glooko (Again)

We believe Glooko has multiple organic growth levers across both sides of the business – Connected Care and Digital Life Sciences – supported by strong market tailwinds around the adoption of digital health tools and new therapies for obesity and diabetes management. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of telehealth and digital health tools, especially for chronic disease management like diabetes, which can often be monitored remotely. The market for digital health tools is experiencing rapid growth and is expected to scale from $20 billion in 2023 to $42 billion by 2028 in the U.S., primarily due to trends such as remote patient monitoring, cloud-enabled medical devices and software-assisted physician decision support.^2,3 

While the Connected Care and Digital Life Sciences capabilities are individually differentiated, we believe they are highly synergistic and leverage a single global platform to create value for all stakeholders – the patient, health care provider, pharmaceutical company, device manufacturer and clinical research organization. The combination of the two business units has developed a unique data flywheel to deliver actionable insights and improved patient outcomes across the platform. For example, as Glooko increases the number of patients and data points on the connected care side of the business, the data offering for clinical trials (such as patient identification for a particular study) becomes more useful. We believe Glooko’s extensive network of clinics across North America, Europe and the Middle East means that digital companion providers have access to an increasingly large and global set of people with diabetes and endocrinologists who would benefit from increased monitoring and care.

Beyond diabetes care, Glooko’s platform offers support for devices that monitor obesity and other chronic diseases. The increasing usage of GLP-1 drugs (such as Mounjaro, Ozempic, Wegovy, Cagrisema and Rybelsus) to treat diabetes and obesity – a market which is forecasted to reach $44 billion in the U.S., growing at a compound annual growth rate of 53% from 2022 to 2030 – is creating a strong tailwind for Glooko across connected clinical trials and new digital companions.³ 

In addition, Glooko’s platform has historically focused on patients with Type 1 diabetes, but the vast majority of people with diabetes are actually diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) estimates the number of adults living with diabetes is projected to rise to 643 million by 2030.³ An increasing percentage of people with Type 2 non-intensive diabetes are moving towards more active care, yet there is a shortage of endocrinologists. This combination has led to an expanding role of Primary Care Physicians (PCPs) in managing patients with both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Today, ~85% of diabetes care is provided by PCPs, who present a large and less penetrated opportunity for diabetes management platforms. Given the breadth of Glooko’s existing device integrations and patient engagement, we believe the company is well positioned to expand into PCP offices and support value-based care through improved care coordination and patient engagement. 

Congratulations to the Glooko team for the recent fundraise, and to Mike Alvarez on his new role as CEO. We look forward to supporting the Glooko team as they continue to grow  across their data insights, device integrations, clinic research and chronic condition support for healthcare providers globally. You can learn more about the company on Glooko.com.

[1] Glooko, 2024.

[2] 2023E market size inclusive of clinical settings data, patient-powered data, pharmacy data and claims data. Source: Mordor Intelligence; Grand View; Verified Market Research; TechSci Research; Statista; Mordor Intelligence; MarketsandMarkets Research; select consultant research and analysis.

[3] Forward looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual outcomes and results may differ materially from such statements.