Elektra Labs: Reshaping the efficacy and responsible deployment of wearables and biosensors
By Ambar Bhattacharyya and Prateesh Maheshwari
We’re proud to have led the $2.9 million seed round for Elektra Labs, a healthcare company building a pharmacy for connected technologies like wearables and biosensors. Along with the funding, Elektra is announcing Atlas, a platform that serves as a catalog of trustworthy remote monitoring technologies and digital biomarkers for decentralized clinical trials, and simplifies the evaluation and deployment of connected tools that collect behavioral or physiological measurements.
We admit it — this is the first deal at Maverick we sourced via Twitter. We were blown away by CEO Andy Coravos’ research on the clinical trial space and equally impressed by her background, having excelled in a variety of business and technical roles and previously serving as EIR at the FDA’s Digital Health Unit. We reached out to Andy proactively, got another entrepreneur to vouch for us, and remained close as she interviewed over 300 stakeholders in the space & formulated her plans for Elektra. As soon as we heard her vision, we were determined to partner with her to help bring it to reality. Andy and her team have shown a special ability to quickly become thought leaders in the remote monitoring and decentralized clinical trial world.
Over the past few years, the FDA has been accelerating its clearances for software-driven products like the atrial fibrillation detection algorithm on the Apple Watch and the ActiGraph activity monitors. Major pharma companies are also actively investing in these technologies, as they’re poised to collect better quality information about patients in their home environments, which could transform both clinical trials and the quality of care.
By 2023, an estimated 5 million individuals will be remotely monitored by healthcare providers — and in this digital era of medicine, Elektra is committed to advancing the safe, effective, and personalized adoption of connected technologies in real-world settings. We believe a trusted third-party will need to build connected technology infrastructure, and Andy and team emanate this vision with their deep commitment to being evidence-driven, transparent, and patient-centric.
Congratulations to Andy and the entire team at Elektra Labs. We look forward to watching their tools bring better infrastructure to the healthcare community, ensuring the technologies we bring to market are worthy of the trust we place in them.
The views expressed herein are solely the views of the author(s) and are not necessarily the views of Maverick Capital, Ltd. or any of its affiliates. They are not intended to provide, and should not be relied upon for, investment advice.
