After the earliest stages of the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated how important access to healthcare outside the hospital can be, several companies have worked to make that access part of the new normal.
For Tasso, the maker of simplified blood collection devices, that work is starting to pay off in a big way. The company has secured $100 million in funding to scale up its production and commercial reach, after raising just $17 million to kick-off its operations in mid-2020.
Using push-button hardware that attaches to the upper arm, Tasso’s OnDemand devices draw blood from capillaries through the skin. With no training necessary—and a device that can produce dried or liquid samples ready to ship through the mail—the company sees its method as a way to fully enable telemedicine and diagnostic testing from the home and elsewhere.
OnDemand received a CE Mark approval in Europe this past May, and Tasso said its devices have been used for a variety of applications internationally, including in siteless clinical trials, biopharma research and remote patient monitoring.
“With the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a fundamental shift in how we think about healthcare, and demand for patient-centric, in-home solutions is greater than ever,” Tasso co-founder and CEO Ben Casavant said in a statement.
The company’s series B round, bringing its lifetime funding total to $131 million, was led by RA Capital Management, with additional backing from the D.E. Shaw group, Senvest, InCube, and SVB Innovation Fund, Foresite Capital, Hambrecht Ducera Growth Ventures, J2V, Cedars-Sinai, and Merck GHIF.
Other blood-collection companies have also found their footing in the wake of COVID-19. Babson Diagnostics—originally spun out of Siemens Healthineers in the pre-pandemic world of 2017—has been working to develop a capillary-tapping device with BD, whose Vacutainer tubes are ubiquitous in venipuncture blood draws performed in doctor’s offices and hospitals.
Aimed at bringing quick blood tests to the retail setting, including grocery stores and pharmacies, Babson raised $31 million last June after being named a 2020 Fierce 15 winner.
Meanwhile, former FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn was named as interim medical chief of a remote blood testing hardware developer founded by Flagship Pioneering, where he landed in June after leaving the agency.
First launched as Seventh Sense Biosystems in 2011, the company recently rebranded as YourBio Health to underline its focus on telehealth and at-home COVID-19 antibody tests. It gathered $21 million in September for its micro-needle device, which received a CE Mark earlier this year.
Hahn has since been named CEO of Flagship’s Harbinger Health—another company potentially destined to be rebranded—as it works on a test that tells people whethe they have cancer based on a blood sample.