Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Businesses need to keep the content flowing on social media, so a startup called soona says it’s developed a new way to provide those photos and video.

The company was founded by CEO Elizabeth Giorgi and Chief Creative Officer Hayley Anderson. Giorgi told me they both worked in production (Anderson as an animator, Giorgi as the founder of her own video production company), and they “kept finding ourselves saying no to projects that needed to be done quickly — we could never find a way to make production move fast enough.”

At the same time, they saw a growing need, as small and medium businesses increasingly rely on email and social marketing to promote themselves, which means they either “go to a stock content site and buy something that isn’t even relevant to their brand, or they can do a DIY solution.”

With soona, customers can get the photos and videos they need within 24 hours, and at a relatively affordable price. Giorgi compared the company’s approach to Kinko’s, which “turned printing into a same-day business 20 years ago.”

Giorgi said soona combines “the best of retail innovation with a strong background in technology.” It operates actual studios where customers come in for photos and video shoots, but it’s also developed software to encode and upload the footage quickly, and to allow customers to “shop [their] content in real-time.”

Soona started out with a studio in Denver and just launched in Minneapolis, and Giorgi said her hope is to open three to five studios in 2020. The service costs $393 per hour for a one-time shoot (with a guarantee of nine edited photos or one edited video), or $453 for a monthly membership.

The company has also launched a service called soona anytime for customers in other geographies — you send soona your product and you get your content in about a week.

Soona is announcing that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding led by 2048 Ventures, with participation from Matchstick Ventures and Techstars Ventures.

Giorgi noted that the fundraising documents include something she’s calling the Candor Clause, which requires investors to disclose if they’ve ever faced issues with sexual assault, sexual harassment or sexual discrimination.

Giorgi said the team at 2048 fully supported this move. In addition, soona is publishing the clause in the hopes that other startups will include take advantage of it, allowing founders and investors to “move past tweets, move towards action, move towards something that makes it clear that there will be consequences” for bad behavior.

“This is not just a woman’s issue, this is an everyone issue,” she added. “We all want to be treated fairly.”

NBC’s new digital streaming news network, NBC News Now, has officially launched. The service offers viewers 8 hours of continuous daily programming from 3 PM to 11 PM on weekdays. Its goal is to capture the attention of younger news consumers — those who don’t necessarily subscribe to pay TV or watch television in a more traditional manner, and who instead often get their news from apps and various streaming channels.

NBC News Now can also be found in an app: the NBC News app for mobile devices and for TVs (by way of apps for Roku, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV). The service is free to stream and supported by ads. Citi is a debut sponsor as the service goes to launch.

The programming featured on the service will be hosted by various NBC News reporters and correspondents from around the world, while production is headquartered in New York. Its content will include hourly live updates it’s calling “Briefly’s” as well as breaking news coverage, in-depth features, interviews, and behind-the-scenes looks at key stories.

NBC is not first to launch an over-the-top (OTT) streaming news service with the aim of targeting millennials and even younger viewers.

CBS’s streaming news service, CBSN has streamed online for several years, and became a part of CBS’ OTT app, CBS All Access, in 2017. It also launched a sports-focused service in 2018. ABC’s more recent effort in this space, ABC News Live, partnered with Roku to become a part of The Roku Channel last year. There’s also the live-streamed business news network, Cheddar, recently acquired by Altice USA. And many more.

But NBC News has found ways to reach a younger demographic before now. It offers several original podcasts and audio shows, and even runs a Snapchat news show that reaches millions, NBC Stay Tuned. The viewers and listeners already familiar with NBC News’ brand and its reporters may decide to follow NBC News to new platforms by way of the new service.

However, it would also make sense for the service to be included in the channel lineup of live TV streaming providers like Sling TV, YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, Hulu with Live TV, and others. NBC doesn’t have any plans for that at present, though, but it’s a likely next step.

For more than 25 years the founders of Thrive Earlier Detection have been researching ways to improve the accuracy of liquid biopsy tests.

The fruits of that labor from Dr. Bert Vogelstein, Dr. Kenneth Kinzler and Dr. Nickolas Papadopoulos — all professors and researchers at Johns Hopkins University — is CancerSEEK, a liquid biopsy test that has demonstrated specificity of over 99% in a retrospective study published by Science earlier this year.

By minimizing false positives, in cancer screening tools and providing a test with proven accuracy doctors can take treatment actions earlier, which can lead to better survival rates for cancer patients.

Now, with FDA approval for its tests for pancreatic and ovarian cancer and a new study underway with a large healthcare provider, CancerSEEK is being rolled out to market through Thrive Earlier Detection with the help of a new $110 million round of funding.

Thrive works by analyzing highly targeted sets of DNA and proteins in the blood to detect cancer.

“Over the past 30 years we have made great strides in understanding cancer. Combining this knowledge with the latest in molecular testing technologies, our founders have developed a simple and affordable blood test for the detection of many cancers at relatively early stages,” said Christoph Lengauer, Ph.D., partner at Third Rock Ventures, and co-founder and chief innovation officer of Thrive, in a statement. “We envision a future where routine preventative care includes a blood test for cancer, just as patients are now routinely tested for early stages of heart disease. We know that if cancer is caught early enough, it can often be cured.”

As part of its rollout, the company’s screening tool is being evaluated in DETECT, a study of 10,000 currently healthy individuals that’s being conducted in conjunction with the healthcare organization Geisinger. So far, 10,000 women between the ages of 65 and 75 without a history of cancer have been enrolled in the trial.

“To be truly useful to patients, new medical technology must be developed with rigorous evidence and designed to be affordable and readily integrated into routine medical care,” said Steven J. Kafka, Ph.D., partner at Third Rock Ventures and chief executive officer of Thrive, said in a statement. “With the help of experts and strategic partners, Thrive is launching today to advance a novel test for the earlier detection of multiple cancers, which we aim to augment with an integrated service that helps patients maneuver the often confusing path that follows a cancer diagnosis.”

Third Rock Ventures actually led the Series A financing for Thrive, and comprise the bulk of the company’s executive team, while Kinzler and Papadopoulos — the researchers from Johns Hopkins who developed the technology — will have seats on the company’s board.

Other investors in the round include Bill Maris’ Section 32 investment firm, Casdin Capital, Biomatics Capital, BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, Invus, Exact Sciences, Cowin Venture, Camden Partners, Gamma 3 LLC and others.

According to Thrive, ovarian, pancreatic and liver cancers are difficult to detect because they can develop in pathways that aren’t always well understood.

Using CancerSEEK, Thrive hopes to develop a blood-based test that can be used in routine medical care, with the goal of identifying multiple cancer types at earlier stages.

The technology works by following genomic mutations in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and cancer-associated protein markers in plasma to identify abnormalities that are common across multiple cancers. In a retrospective study published by Science in 2018, CancerSEEK was shown to perform with greater than 99% specificity and with sensitivities ranging from 69% to 98% for the detection of five cancer types – ovarian, liver, stomach, pancreas and esophageal, which the company says are cancers for which there no screening tests available for average-risk individuals.

Thrive’s research has attracted an all-star executive team in addition to Lengauer and Kafka from Third Rock. Former Goldman Sachs lead medical technology analyst Isaac Ro is joining the company as chief financial officer, and the company’s head of research is Isaac Kinde, a co-inventor of the CancerSEEK technology.

It’s hard to overstate how transformative the Thrive test could prove to be. Having a blood-based diagnostic test for cancer prevalence and the ability to initiate treatment earlier radically improves the chances for surviving a cancer diagnosis.

 

Weights & Biases, a startup building development tools for machine learning, has raised $15 million in its second round of funding.

The company was started by CrowdFlower founders Lukas Biewald and Chris van Pelt, along with former Google engineer Shawn Lewis. (Under its new name Figure Eight, CrowdFlower was acquired by Appen for up to $300 million in March.)

When Weights & Biases launched last year, Biewald (who I’ve known since college) said he wanted to create the tools needed to “build and deploy great deep learning models.” Its initial product allows companies to monitor those models as they develop and train them.

“When people build machine learning models they need to track everything that happens — the code that went into the model, the hyperparameters that go into the model and then basically how well the model does,” Biewald told me this week. “You add a couple lines of code to your … training code and then every time your model runs, it reports what happens to the server.”

Customers include OpenAI, Github, Qualcomm and Toyota Research Institute, as well as research institutions like Stanford and Columbia. The new round — led by Coatue Management, with participation from angels including GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Salesforce Chief Scientist Richard Socher — brings Weights & Biases’ total funding to $20 million.

The company has also launched Benchmarks, a new product that allows practitioners to collaborate on the same machine learning models. Biewald acknowledged that commercial enterprises probably won’t want to take this approach, but he suggested that researchers can use this so they “don’t have to rerun lots of training examples” and “just to move the state of the art forward.”

Looking at how the industry has evolved, Biewald said, “It’s gone really mainstream. What people don’t realize is how much machine learning is actually used in real companies today … Almost any company of reasonable size is doing machine learning. A lot of the applications are kind of boring but important to the company that’s doing them.”

Nor does Biewald think we should be discouraged by headlines like the news that Google’s Duplex service for restaurant reservations often relies on humans rather than bots.

“I don’t think it’s smoke and mirrors to combine humans and machine learning algorithms,” he said. “Every credit card company is using machine learning to prevent fraud, or whatever do, they have humans check a lot of it … I don’t know why people feel it needs to be so binary, like we either automate everything or nothing. If you can automate half of it, that’s pretty good.”

A new startup aims to help you get your student loans under control. Today, an app called Pillar, backed by $5.5 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins, is launching a simpler way for consumers to better understand their student loan debt — and even pay it off early.

To do so, the app connects with your student loan servicer and bank, then makes personalized suggestions based on your loans, your income, and your spending. When it finds a way you can make a bigger dent in your overall student loan debt, it will send an alert to your smartphone.

Pillar co-founder and CEO Michael Bloch, an early DoorDash employee, said he came up with the idea after his wife graduated from law school with around $300,000 worth of student loans.

“We struggled to figure out the right way to pay them back,” he explains. “We read blog posts and articles. We made spreadsheets. We even talked to a financial advisor. But there really was no easy way for us to figure out what was the right thing for us to do. And I realized there are 45 million people with loans, and millions of those people have had the exact same experience as I did.”

Bloch decided then to drop out of Stanford Business School to instead focus on building Pillar along with co-founder and CTO Gilad Kahala.

Above: Michael Bloch (L) and Gilad Kahala (R)

The problem they’re attacking is massive. Student loan debt is the second largest type of consumer debt in the U.S., with 45 million borrowers owing more than $1.5 trillion in student loans. 7 out of 10 students take out loans to pay for college, and the average person graduates with $30,000 in debt which takes 20 years to pay off. For those with $60,000 in debt, it can take more than 30 years to pay off. And nearly 20 percent of borrowers have over $100,000 in debt.

In addition, women are disproportionally affected by this problem, notes Bloch. Women hold two-thirds of student loan debt, he points out. This is because there are more women (around 56%) than men attending college these days, and because of the gender pay gap — which means it takes longer for women to pay back their loans.

At launch, Pillar walks new users through a quick sign-up process where you authenticate with your loan provider and bank account. (The company says it uses security best practices, and doesn’t store any login information or passwords on its own servers.)

As Pillar analyzes your spending and pay schedule, it can figure out when you can start making an extra payment towards your loans. It also calculates what that means in terms of paying off your loan earlier. This is especially useful for those who don’t necessarily receive a steady paycheck, or whose income fluctuates for other reasons — they may have trouble determining how much they can actually afford to chip in.

The company does not offer to refinance loans, to be clear, nor will it point you toward those options. In fact, it expects many of its users wouldn’t be able to take advantage of refinancing options, anyway.

“Companies like SoFi actually turn away around 97 percent of everybody who applies for refinancing, because they’re too high a credit risk — they look at your credit scores, your income, the type of job you have — most people don’t qualify for lower rates on refinancing,” Bloch says.

Instead, Pillar targets the larger majority who make less than $100,000 per year and have fewer options.

“What we found is that these small actions that people can take — where it’s not necessarily a hundred dollars this month. But even making a $5 a week extra payment can make a really big difference to somebody’s financial life in the long run,” he explains.

Users can opt to make these additional payments through Pillar itself, instead of having to go through the sometimes clunky student loan provider’s website.

Pillar works with nearly all major student loan servicers — including Nelnet, Navient, Great Lakes, Fedloan Servicing, and others.

Prior to today, the company had been running a private beta with an undisclosed number of users who are now using Pillar to manage their collective $50 million-plus in loan debt. During this period, the average borrower saved around $6,000 and about four years on repayment, Bloch claims.

What Pillar does not do, at this point, is to help borrowers navigate student loan forgiveness programs. That’s on its roadmap, however. It plans to offer tools and automation to help its users navigate those programs in the future. Longer-term, Pillar wants to do for all consumer debt — including credit cards — what it’s now doing for student loans.

While Pillar is attacking a real problem, it’s not yet a comprehensive solution — or even the best way for a consumer to handle their overall debt.

As Genevieve Dobson, founder and CEO of debt management company Degrees of Success, points out, the interest rates on consumers’ student loans may lower than the high interest rates on their credit cards and other debt that should be paid down first.

Plus, she notes, “it would not be suggested for anyone who qualifies for an income-based repayment or other lower payment option. It’s also not a good option for those who qualify for any of the forgiveness programs. And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to tell people to utilize the income-driven repayment options instead, which could end up harming someone rather than helping them.”

In time, hopefully, Pillar will become more comprehensive to address the needs of all borrowers. For now, however, it makes the best sense for those who only hold student loan debt and are looking to pay it down more quickly.

Pillar says it will keep all its advice free, but will charge a low, around $1 per month subscription fee for premium features at some point in the future. The company will also provide (not sell) anonymized loan data to nonprofits and research institutions who are working to advance the national conversation and policy around student loans.

In addition to Kleiner Perkins, other seed round participants include Rainfall Ventures, Great Oaks VC, Financial Venture Studio, Kairos, and Day One Ventures. Individual investors include Adam Nash, the former CEO of Wealthfront and Acorns board member; Noah Weiss, former SVP of Product at Foursquare; Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner, co-founders of Flatiron Health; Misha Esipov, CEO and co-founder of Nova Credit; and Robinhood’s Head of Growth, Patrick Kavanagh, and Head of Finance, Nadia Asoyan.

The Pillar team is currently 10 people in New York, and looking to double the size of the team over the next year with a particular focus on hiring engineers.

Pillar is available on iOS and Android. You will still need to join the waitlist, as people are being allowed into Pillar in stages as it launches.

This morning’s Moto Z4 news was good cause to go back and reassess the state of the modular phone. Three years after the line launched, the concept hasn’t exactly ignited the market — in fact there are really just a handful of scattered competitors to show for it. Essential is among the most prominent with the PH-1’s clever two pin connector.

By sheer coincidence, it turns out today is the two year anniversary of the company’s debut. Founder Andy Rubin took to the stage at Code 2017 with big ideas and two products. One, the Ph-1 has come and gone, launching a couple of months late in August 2017 before being discontinued late last year. The other, the Essential Home hub never appeared at all.

The day the products were announced, then COO Niccolo de Masi (who appears to have since moved on to Honeywell spinoff, Resideo), spoke of a the company’s ten-year plan. It was an acknowledgement that it had a tough road ahead, as it planned to take on big names like Apple and Samsung. But the company certainly had the money. A $300 million raise helped the startup achieve unicorn status not long after taking the stage at the conference

But the intervening two years have been plagued with bad news. In spite of positive reviews,  the company reportedly only shipped 88,000 phones in 2017. The PH-1 got a massive price drop and its first modular accessory, a 360 camera, was discounted to $19, down from $250.

Last May, rumors surfaced that the company had gone up for sale and its followup phone had been canceled. And in October, it laid off nearly a third of its staff. Founder Andy Rubin has been laying low in the meantime. That same month, The New York Times published an explosive story about a $90 Million Google pay off in the wake of sexual misconduct claims, causing him to take leave from Essential.

All the while, however, the company has firmly denied claims that it’s going away. I spoke to a rep and the company recently who said things are in the works, without revealing any specifics. There have been ton of patent filings that appear to point to some future handset. It announced a new mod for the PH-1 in June and even acquired a company in December. Hell, earlier this month, it issued a new security patch, holding to its promise of monthly updates — a hell of a lot more than many more successful smartphone makers have offered.

That’s part of what makes the Essential story so frustrating. The PH-1 was a novel device, among the first to go with a camera notch display. Its $699 price (later reduced to $499) also predated Samsung/Apple/Google’s move into budget flagships. But even with a unicorn valuation, hardware is hard. And Essential may have entered the market at the worst possible time, as smartphone sales were beginning to flag for the first time ever.

Two years after launch, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Essential’s time may have come and gone. For now, however, the company appears to simply be biding its time before announcing what comes next.

Millions of photos taken by Theta360 camera owners — some private and unlisted — were left exposed after security researchers found an open database without a password.

Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the leaky database and reported the exposure to Ricoh, which secured the database within a day. The printing tech giant has sold thousands of the 360-degree camera since the device’s debut in 2014. Users can upload and share their photos and videos to the cloud using the camera.

But that cloud database that was left wide open, said Rotem and Locar, who also wrote up their findings. Anyone with access to the database could have easily accessed any of the 11 million photos stored online.

The researchers shared a sample of the data with TechCrunch to verify. We were able to easily access private and unlisted photos uploaded to Ricoh’s website by transplanting the unique file identifier found in the database into the cloud storage server’s web address.

In some cases the user’s name and captions were also viewable.

When asked, Ricoh spokesperson John Greco did not dispute the researchers’ 11 million figure, but confirmed the exposure: “Ricoh was recently notified of this configuration issue and corrected it within hours.”

“We take the security of customer information extremely seriously. It’s important to note that before the resolution, further steps beyond accessing the records would have been necessary and would require a deeper level of expertise to ultimately view the images. Today, private photos are only accessible to those with a direct link, a design feature that is intended to allow customers to share their images,” said Greco.

Although the database is inaccessible, the photos can still be accessed — including private and unlisted photos — if the web address is known.

Rotem and Locar called the exposure a “major privacy breach.”

Ricoh didn’t say for how long the database was exposed. The build date of the database suggests it was created on April 1. But Shodan, a database for exposed devices and databases, first spotted the database on May 9.

The researchers discovered the exposure over a month later on May 14, but praised the company for its quick remediation.

Read more:

• Flipboard hacks prompt password resets for millions of users
• After breach, Stack Overflow says some user data exposed
• An unsecured SMS spam operation doxxed its owners
• Samsung spilled SmartThings app source code and secret keys
• Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system
• A leaky database of SMS text messages exposed password resets and two-factor codes
• Chipotle customers are saying their accounts have been hacked

If you haven’t noticed, security companies are a pretty hot commodity these days. Just yesterday, Palo Alto Networks bought two security startups. Earlier this week, FireEye bought Verodin for $250 million, and today, private equity firm Insight Partners announced it was buying threat intelligence vendor Recorded Future for $780 million.

What Insight is buying is a company that generates information to help customers better understand the external cyber threats they are facing. It’s easy to see where a company like that could have value in today’s world. It boasts 400 customers including GlaxoSmithKline, Morgan Stanley, The Gap and Verizon (the owner of this publication).

As you might expect, Recorded Future sees the deal as a way to continue growing. “This evolution of our relationship [with Insight] will allow Recorded Future to better serve its current and future clients as we tap into the full potential of our technical roadmap and position our software to truly answer some of the most difficult and unique intelligence challenges faced by our community,” company CEO Christopher Ahlberg said in a statement.

The company was founded in 2009 and has raised almost $58 million, according to Crunchbase data. The most recent round for $25 million in 2017 was led by none other than Insight Partners . They apparently liked what they saw and wanted the entire company.

The deal essentially buys out earlier investors, which included GV (Google’s venture arm), In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s venture arm), IA Ventures, Balderton Capital, Mass Mutual Ventures and others — and gives them a healthy return in the process.

The pace of malicious hacks and security breaches is showing no signs of slowing down, and spend among enterprises to guard against that is set to reach $124 billion this year. That’s also having a knock-on effect on the most innovative cybersecurity startups, which continue to raise big money to grow and meet that demand.

In the latest development, a New York startup called BlueVoyant — which provides managed security, professional services and most recently threat intelligence — has picked up $82.5 million in a Series B round of funding at a valuation in excess of $430 million.

The funding is coming from a range of new and existing investors that includes Fiserv, the fintech giant that’s acquiring First Data for $22 billion. (The startup is not disclosing any other names at this time, it said.) It has raised $207.5 million to date.

BlueVoyant has a notable pedigree that goes some way also to explaining how the idea for the startup first germinated.

Co-founder and CEO Jim Rosenthal met his co-founder Tom Glocer (the former CEO of Thomson Reuters) when Rosenthal was COO of Morgan Stanley and Glocer was a director at the financial services giant (Glocer is still on the board). Glocer said that in 2012 and 2013, a fair amount of Rosenthal’s work involved cyber defense, and he came into close contact there with Glocer, who was chairing the operations and technology committee at the time.

“Here was an incredibly strategic, smart fellow in charge of operations,” he said of Rosenthal. “When it came time for him to retire, he told me he wanted to do one more big thing, but in a more entrepreneurial fashion. I suggested to him that the next step could be to work on [cybersecurity], which we were focusing on at Morgan Stanley.”

Glocer noted that the bank was spending some $300 million annually on cybersecurity at the time. It effectively had all the resources of the world at its disposal to invest in tackling the risks, but the two were all too aware of how even that could prove not to be enough — and of course for any company with fewer resources, or that wasn’t build as a tech company or with technology as part of its DNA.

BlueVoyant was built with those kinds of challenges in mind.

The startup has amassed talent from the world of private enterprise, but also a number of government organizations such as the NSA, FBI, GCHQ and Unit 8200 — which are alternately renowned and somewhat notorious for their work in cybersecurity and hacking. Its offices span a multitude of geographies that speaks to the customers that it has picked up in its quiet growth to date (which also gives some color to its valuation, too). In addition to the US, it has operatoins in Israel, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Philippines.

Tapping that talent pool, the company focuses on three areas of service for its customers: threat intelligence, managed security and professional services (with the latter focused specifically on those related to security implementations and operations).

Within these, Rosenthal said in an interview that it both builds its own IP, and also brings in software from a range of trusted partners (which include many of the biggest security software companies around today). Key to the proposition, though, is also the implementation of that technology. The theory is that technology will only get a company so far: you need a multi-level strategy when it comes to cybersecurity, and part of that will involve people able to identify vulnerabilities and figuring out how to fix or defend around them.

BlueVoyant believes the opportunity for it is twofold: targeting small and medium enterprises — the pitch being that it can provide the same kind of software and level of services that large enterprises enjoy; and targeting larger enterprises that may already have large IT budgets and teams tasked with cybersecurity, but could still use supplementary work from a world-class team of experts that would be a challenge to amass directly.

“My view is that for firms with very good cyber defenses, external cyber intelligence is important because you can’t defend everything equally,” Rosenthal said. “Having good actionable defense makes it better.

“Then for firms that are unable to afford an excellent cyber defense instructed by themselves and may not be able to attract the talent necessary, a managed security service is the right and important answer,” he continued. “That kind of managed security now needs to be available to companies of all sizes, not just the big ones but small and medium organizations, too. We have created a tech stack and level of talent capable of providing those.”

The formula appears to be working. Since launching the first tranche of its offering, managed services, in 2018, BlueVoyant has picked up some 150 customers in verticals like financial services, manufacturing, municipal government and education.

Working with partners is one way that BlueVoyant plans to expand that customer base over time. Fiserv is backing the startup as a strategic investment and the two will collaborate on providing respective services to each other’s clients. Specifically, Glocer noted that many of the banks that Fiserv currently works with are typical targets: businesses that have a lot to lose in a breach, but may lack the size to ever adequately secure its infrastructure and other assets.

“The strategic alliance between Fiserv and BlueVoyant brings advanced cyber defense capabilities to banks and credit unions of all sizes,” said Byron Vielehr, Chief Administrative Officer of Fiserv. “Our continued investment in BlueVoyant underscores the value these capabilities can bring to our clients.”

BlueVoyant is not the only big security startup to raise at a high valuation in recent times. Auth0 raised $103 million at a $1 billion valuation last week. In April, Bitglass closed a $70 million round. 2018 had seen a high water mark for security funding, with startups raking in a record $5.3 billion in the year: it will be worth watching to see whether the ongoing march of breaches will see those figures rise again this year.

For the past nineteen years, Ioannis Tarnanas, the founder and chief scientific officer at Altoida, has been developing virtual and augmented reality tools to offer predictions about the onset of mental illness in older patients.

The company, whose tools have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for predicting Alzheimer’s, claims that it can determine whether someone will present with the disease six-to-ten years before the onset of mild cognitive impairment symptoms with a 94% accuracy.

In 2019, Alzheimer’s and other dementias will cost the U.S. nearly $290 billion and that figure could rise as high as $1.1 trillion by 2050, according to Altoida.

The number of people living with Alzheimer’s disease is rapidly growing. In 2019 alone, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias will cost the nation $290 billion. By 2050, these costs could rise as high as $1.1 trillion, but Altoida says that these costs can be prevented if the disease is caught early enough.

Altoida uses an iPad or a tablet accelerometer, a gyroscope, and touch screen sensors to detect what the company calls “micro-errors” as patients complete a series of AR and VR challenges. It’s basically a game of hide-and-seek where patients put virtual objects in different physical spaces in a clinical environment and then try to collect them.

Right now, the company’s technology is only available as a clinically supervised test in a doctor’s office, but the company is beginning to look at bringing its diagnostic tools into the home.

“In this field there are two major waves. Passive digital biomarkers and active digital biomarkers. With passive biomarkers you collect data from sensors,” says Tarnanas. “To give you an example of what this means in real life. [With passive digital biomarkers] you wind up collecting huge amounts of data and you see spikes and associate that with more everyday function or not… you are never sure whether this is due to day to day activity.”

Tarnanas started conducting longitudinal clinical trials around cognitive testing in the early 2000s while he was working on his Masters at the University of Sussex. He then moved to San Diego and worked in the Virtual Reality Medical Center before moving on to Bern Switzerland to conduct additional research. Tarnanas finally settled in Houston, where Altoida is now based.

“Developing enhanced methods to objectively evaluate cognitive function is a critical component of the next generation digital medicine — a component that is required to not only advance the basic research in neurodegenerative disease, but also one that is required for the development of improved clinical interventions,” said Dr. Walter Greenleaf, PhD, a neuroscientist and Distinguished Visiting Scholar working at the Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in a statement. “Understanding neurodegenerative biotypes will dramatically improve our ability to conduct a differential diagnosis at the primary care level.  Improved diagnostics will provide healthcare professionals with the key information necessary to precisely adapt clinical interventions to personalize the patient’s cognitive care. This will ultimately lead to improved outcomes of care and to reduced healthcare costs.”

Some influential healthcare investors are already on board. Altoida has raised $6.3 million in a new round of financing from investors led by M Ventures, the corporate investment arm of the pharmaceutical company Merck, with additional participation from Grey Sky Venture Partners, VI Partners AG, Alpana Ventures, and FYRFLY Venture Partners.

“The beauty of active digital biomarkers is that they can actually expand to more conditions,” says Tarnanas. The company is looking at expanding its prognostic toolkits to determining lasting impacts from traumatic brain injuries, and post-operative cognitive disorder, he says.

“As the world’s effort to introduce meaningful therapies for Alzheimer’s disease inches closer and closer to success, it is clear that the greatest benefit will come to those whose disease is detected at a very early stage,” said Jonathan L. Liss, MD, Director at Columbus Memory Center and Founder of Columbus Memory Project, who has been using Altoida’s technology since September 2018. “The Altoida Neuro-Motor Index (NMI) device offers an ingenious way in which to detect early disease and track progression without prolonged cognitive testing, tissue sampling, or radiologic intervention. The Altoida NMI device is a welcome advancement to the field of cognitive health.”

Altoida isn’t alone in trying to find a way to diagnose Alzheimer’s earlier. Recently, MyndYou, a New York-based company announced a partnership with Mizuho to bring its passive prognostic toolkit to Japan. That company recently secured roughly $2 million to build out its own solution.