Six years ago, Dave Korsunsky was gaining weight and losing sleep. He looked to a lifestyle change as a cure — switching to an ancestral diet, learning to meditate and building an analytics platform that would help his doctor three states away track his progress and manage his muscle gain.
Today, that passion project is Heads Up Health, a healthtech startup based in Fort Collins that just raised $1.3 million from Inno Ventures.
“I was just trying to figure out how to optimize my body so I could perform better,” Korsunsky told Built In. “Show up as a better human to work every single day, better relate to people that I love, look better, feel better. I was always a tinkerer.”
In 2014, Korsunsky left his job managing a team of engineers and officially founded Heads Up Health, with the aim of investigating how connected fitness tools could help him lead his best life. The company launched a consumer product in July of 2017 — to help individuals self-monitor health metrics on their own — and this January, launched its professional edition, which allows providers to remotely monitor their patients.
Today, Heads Up Health centralizes patient information from wearable devices, genomics, lab results and electronic health records into a single, HIPAA-compliant platform. The company claims to help more than 30,000 individuals across the world track their health progress, with users ranging from athletes to primary care physicians and wellness coaches. As more doctor visits shift online during the COVID-19 pandemic, and more athletes track their workouts virtually, Korsunsky said Heads Up Health’s investment comes at a pivotal moment in the healthcare industry.
“In this day and age, every doctor’s visit now is being done remotely,” Korsunsky said. “We’re providing a platform to do very effective, and very precise, remote health monitoring.”
Going forward, Korsunsky said Heads Up plans to move from a monolithic Ruby on Rails application to a more scalable architecture comprised of containers and microservices to accommodate enterprise customers. The company also plans to invest in additional data analytics and reporting tools, integrating machine learning into its system to identify health insights about its customers. As the use of telehealth explodes, Heads Up plans to add secure messaging and chat, as well as make it easier for providers to bill insurance companies for remote health monitoring services performed through its platform.
The seed round brings total investment in the 10-person company to $3.1 million, Korsunsky said.
“COVID was a huge driver for more telemedicine adoption. It brought down a lot of regulatory barriers, introduced new incentive models,” Korsunsky said. “We see that continuing to expand over the next 24 months. There’s a lot of opportunity as healthcare adapts to this new environment.”
