With 3 consecutive days of $100M in funding, here is the most confusing (or rather the most confused we have been) Episode 147 of Health in 2 Point 00. Jess asks me about Verily partnering with Swiss Re to get into the stop-loss insurance game, Prescryptive Health raising a $26M Series A for their maybe GoodRx-like or PBM platform, Sonde Health acquiring NeuroLex for its vocal biomarkers platform, Aetion reopening their Series B and raising another $19M to the $36M they have already raised, and Otsuka after investing millions of dollars in Proteus, deciding to buy the rest of it with $15M, but we don’t know why any of these deals happened –Matthew Holt
– Sonde Health acquires NeuroLex Laboratories, Inc. to forms
one of the world’s preeminent biobanks focused on vocal biomarkers.
– NeuroLex’s core product, SurveyLex, makes it easy to
create and distribute voice surveys in less than a minute as URL links through
web browsers.
Sonde Health, a
Boston-based digital vocal biomarker technology platform announced it has acquired NeuroLex Laboratories, Inc., a leading
voice-enabled survey and data acquisition platform. The
acquisition brings together two of the leading forces in the vocal biomarker
space.
Sonde will acquire NeuroLex’s popular web-enabled voice
survey and analysis platform, as well as its rich dataset, which when combined
with Sonde’s leading voice-based dataset, forms one of the world’s preeminent
biobanks focused on vocal biomarkers. In addition, merging Sonde’s mobile and
voice-assistant platforms with NeuroLex’s web-based capabilities will enable
the delivery of voice-enabled heath detection and monitoring over any platform.
Democratizing Voice Computing
Over the past two years, NeuroLex has built one of the
largest laboratories in the world to collect, label, and model voice data
tagged with health conditions comprised of over 40 research fellows across 12
universities that have published over 5 peer-reviewed journal articles.
NeuroLex’s core product, SurveyLex, makes it easy to create and distribute
voice surveys in less than a minute as URL links through web browsers. With
this product, NeuroLex has curated a biobank comprised of over 500,000 voice samples
from over 30,000 individuals alongside a host of pharmaceutical and academic
partners.
Acquisition
Benefits for Sonde
“At Sonde, we have unlocked voice as a new vital sign to enable secure, accessible, and non-intrusive monitoring of health. Incorporating NeuroLex’s impressive work in voice-based surveys and research moves us significantly forward in becoming the one-stop shop for health condition detection and monitoring through voice,” said David Liu, CEO of Sonde Health. “NeuroLex’s voice-based survey platform and biobank will accelerate our research and development, and our collection and analysis of high-quality voice data, bolstering all the products we provide to our customers.”
Sonde’s proprietary technology works by sensing and
analyzing subtle changes in the voice due to changes in a person’s physiology.
The company’s respiratory and depression health checks are available
today.
As part of the acquisition, Jim Schwoebel, the chief executive
officer of NeuroLex, will join Sonde’s leadership team as Vice President, Data
and Research.
“I am thrilled to bring Jim and his team on board,” continued Liu. “His experience in building NeuroLex, shared mission of using vocal biomarkers to move healthcare forward, and expertise in building large voice-based datasets and machine learning make Jim a tremendous addition to the Sonde team.”
Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
