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Venture Capital News: KenSci Raises $8.5M Series A Round

2017-01-26
SEATTLE, WA, KenSci announced today that it has raised $8.5M in a Series A funding led by Ignition Partners with participation from Osage University Partners and Mindset Ventures.
The funding will accelerate innovation for KenSci's machine learning platform and expand operations to support the company's rapidly growing customer base.

KenSci's healthcare data platform and machine learning-powered applications are built collaboratively with practicing physicians, data scientists, machine learning developers and computing and biomedical researchers. KenSci is uniquely engineered to predict clinical risk, financial risk and operational risk, enabling health systems to transition to value-based care. Incubated at the University of Washington (UW) Tacoma, KenSci was spun out in 2015 after more than four years of research and industry-academic collaboration. KenSci leverages Microsoft's Azure and Cortana suite to power secure, cloud-scale machine learning, and was previously part of Microsoft Accelerators' Data Science program.

'We invested in KenSci based on the fact that the problems KenSci addresses are increasingly central to value-based care. KenSci has successfully integrated advanced machine learning with complex healthcare workflows to deliver tangible ROI for some of the biggest health systems within 90 days,' said John Connors, managing partner at Ignition Partners. 'Because of this, KenSci's risk prediction platform has already improved outcomes for thousands of lives and helped providers save millions of dollars, and this is only the beginning.'

As healthcare shifts to a value-based model, payers and providers are increasingly under pressure to proactively bend the risk curve in population health by transitioning to a preventive healthcare model. Physicians, care managers and CMIOs leverage KenSci to intervene early, redesign care pathways and optimize population health across the care continuum. KenSci's machine learning platform and solutions help health systems answer the hard questions regarding who might get sick, how sick they might get, what can be done about it and how care can be optimized for cost and outcome. Finance and actuarial teams rely on KenSci to predict utilization, optimize resource allocation and detect fraud, waste, and abuse throughout the revenue cycle.

'St. Luke's Health Partners is committed to leading the transformation to value-based care in Idaho. Core to our transition is our ability to identify rising health concerns based on patterns in data and provide appropriate and precise interventions,' said St. Luke's chief physician executive Dr. George Beauregard. 'KenSci's platform will accelerate our integration of machine learning capabilities to improve health outcomes in the population for which we are accountable.'

'The challenge in healthcare analytics is not in the lack of data but in the ability to connect and combine data meaningfully to unearth patterns and predict risks. Legacy systems of records have created walled gardens, unwittingly causing poor health outcomes and creating an upward spiral in healthcare costs,' said Samir Manjure, CEO and co-founder of KenSci. 'We are engineering a system of insight, on top of these legacy systems, to help enable our customers to predict and intervene ahead of time rather than drive looking backward. As our customers have come to trust us with their advanced data science needs, they are asking us for more machine learning solutions and more integrations. This investment will help us serve them better across the care and cost spectrum, enabling them to fight death with data science.'

About KenSci

KenSci is building the world's first vertically integrated machine learning platform for healthcare, making it more proactive, coordinated and accountable, fast. KenSci's platform is engineered to ingest, transform and integrate healthcare data across clinical, claims, and patient generated sources. A library of over 150+ prebuilt models and modular solutions for clinical and operational risk prediction enable customers to ask and answer harder questions faster, with average deployment taking 10 weeks and ROI visibility in 90 days. KenSci was incubated at University of Washington's Center for Data Science at UW Tacoma and designed on the cloud with help from Microsoft's Azure4Research grant program. KenSci is headquartered in Seattle, with offices in Dallas, Singapore and Hyderabad. For more information, visit www.kensci.com.
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