K Health raises $132M, launches pediatric telemedicine service

The company uses AI to help users get diagnosed, while also allowing them to connect with a doctor

Telemedicine was the big winner of 2020, with huge gains in both adoption, growing to 20 percent of all visits, and investments, with dollars into this sector nearly doubling from 2019 and companies like Amwell, MDLive, Carbon Health, Eko Health, and Binah.ai all raising funding, just to name a few.

With COVID sadly still raging, it doesn't look like interest in the space is going to slow down any time soon.

The latest telemedicine company to raise funding is K Health, a company that deploys a machine that can mimic different diagnosis, giving patients free information on their health based on people who are similar to them.

On Tuesday, the company announced that it raised a $132 million Series E round of funding, led by GGV Capital and Valor Equity Partners with participation from Kaiser Permanente pension fund, LTS Investments, 14W, Max Ventures, Pico Partners, Marcy Venture Partners, Primary Venture Partners and BoxGroup.

This round, which brings K Health's total funding to $273.3 million, will help the company to expand and upgrade its technology, the company told told VatorNews.

Founded in October 2016, K Health uses AI and machine learning to allow users to look up their symptoms, allowing users to see how doctors diagnose and treat similar people with similar symptoms for free.

Users first chat with an AI that has been trained on a dataset from billions of anonymized clinical data points, taking into account a user's gender, age, acute symptoms, and other biomarkers, to accurately show users how other people like them dealt with symptoms and conditions. That can include anything from mental health to back pain, headaches, abdominal pain, chest pain, rashes, fatigue, STDs and bladder infections, among numerous others.

If needed, users can then chat with a doctor for fast, personalized care. Connecting directly with a doctor costs $19, which also includes three days of follow-up. For unlimited access to doctors, users can sign up for a K Health membership, which costs $9 per month.

K Health now has over 4 million users and more than 7.3 million health dialogues on the platform. Like many other telemedicine companies, K Health has "scaled tremendously since the start of the pandemic," the company said, growing its users by 300 percent, while demand increased 1,000 percent in that time. 

Along with the funding news, K Health also unveiled its new pediatrics solution, called K for Parents, which includes a free symptom checker, and the ability for families to learn how doctors treated children with similar conditions, as well as access to pediatric care as part of a K Health membership. 

This comes as COVID has made it more difficult for parents to take their children to the doctor; a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics this past summer estimated that children were missing between 70 percent to 80 percent of their scheduled pediatric appointments. The goal of K for Parents is to help get those children to their necessary appointments. 

Finally, the company also announced two new board members: Valor Equity Partners’ Founder and CEO Antonio Gracias and GGV Capital’s Managing Partner Hans Tung. Vivek Pattipati, Partner at Valor, will join as an observer.