Ovuline rebrands as Ovia Health, raises $10M to expand benefits business

By Jonah Comstock
07:00 am
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Ovuline, which makes a suite of women's and family health apps, has raised $10 million in new funding and is renaming the company "Ovia Health". Ovia was already the brand name attached to its suite of apps. Martin Ventures and Zaffre Investments, the investment arm of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, led the round. All of the company's previous investors returned for the round, including Lightbank Ventures, LionBird Ltd, and Bullet Time Venture.

The company has been expanding its enterprise operations, with payer customers including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Optum, General Electric, and Activision. Ovia recently hired Greg Nash, former VP of sales at Castlight and Omada, as the head of benefits products. CEO Paris Wallace told MobiHealthNews that the funding will primarily go to building out Nash's team.

"We’re using the majority of the funding to work with him to build his team to really help us grow the business in the employer and insurer markets, as well as increasing our clinical footprint … and really thinking about what our provider strategy is and beginning to execute on that," he said.

Towards that end, Ovia just recently received HI-TRUST certification which makes it easier for the company to work with covered entities and handle patient health information, Wallace said. 

In addition to expanding its footprint in the payer and provider market, Ovia is also expanding its direct to consumer app portfolio. Last week the company launched Ovia Parenting, its app for parents of children ages 0 to 4. 

"At the broadest level, we wanted to create an ecosystem where our users could do all the work that they need to do around starting a family and connecting with the healthcare system," Wallace said. "So we started in fertility and I now like to say we go from wanting a family to having a four-year-old. We also have a lot of customers who just want to track their cycles because we’re the most accurate period tracker app out there."

Ovia Parenting is available to direct to consumer users now, and will be incorporated into Ovia Health, the company's health plan and employer offering, at the beginning of next year. Wallace says the launch of Ovia Parenting and the expanded focus on the enterprise side are both part of the company's overarching vision.

"We really came here with a bold vision of how we can fundamentally change the interaction between the millenial genration of parents and the healthcare system and ultimately make health an everyday lifestyle," Wallace said. "Part of that was building these amazing front-end apps that delight the user and get them coming back -- our average user is coming back more than once a day and sharing all these details about their health. But that’s kind of table stakes. We’ve always seen ourselves as a healthcare business and a data business."

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