Money Moves: 3 life science and health IT companies raise funds — and one goes public

Money Moves is a column where we chart the funding raises of tech companies across the region. Have a tip? Email us at philly@technical.ly.

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Harmony Biosciences, a Plymouth Meeting-based pharmaceutical company that develops and commercializes therapies for people living with rare neurological disorders, officially went public this week.

The company said on Tuesday that the pricing of its upsized initial public offering of 5,348,837 shares of common stock would be be $24.00 per share.

“The gross proceeds of the offering, before deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and other offering expenses payable by Harmony, are expected to be $128.4 million,” the company said in a press release.

However, the stock closed Wednesday at $37.01 — up 54%, reported the Philadelphia Business Journal.

It follows the recent IPO announcements of King of Prussia’s Vertex and Plymouth Meeting’s Accolade. In September of last year, Harmony raised $50 million.

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Strados Labs has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant for nearly $225,000 to conduct research on its wearable platform for remote respiratory monitoring.

The Old City-based startup, which raised nearly $2 million last year, makes a noninvasive respiratory smart system that consists of a “small, lightweight acoustic sensor array that records lung sounds and uploads them to a digital clinician portal,” the company said in an announcement. “Once the device has recorded the patient’s lung sounds, the clinician is able to access them remotely at any time for analysis.”

The work is especially relevant as medical professionals come to understand more about how COVID-19 can effect the respiratory tract, and this grant will be “instrumental” in Strados bringing the electronic stethoscope to more patients and clinicians, said Strados cofounder and CEO Nicholas Delmonico in a statement.

“There are currently no effective ways to capture abnormal patient lung sounds remotely, putting patients at risk between rounds and face-to-face doctors’ visits,” he said. “This grant will help us change that.”

As Delmonico told Technical.ly at the time of the 2019 raise, Strados was inspired by the founder’s own respiratory issues that landed him in and out of many nurse’s offices and emergency rooms for most of his childhood.

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Chadds Ford-based life sciences company Mobilion Systems raised a $35 million Series B round led by aMoon, with contributions by existing investors such as Agilent Technologies, IP Group, Hostplus and Cultivation Capital, the company announced last week.

Mobilion intends to use the round to build out its commercial team supporting the launch of its first product, the Structures for Lossless Ion Manipulation (SLIM). SLIM technology quickly “separates, identifies and analyzes even the most challenging, clinically significant molecules that other instruments fail to detect,” per the company, “enabling earlier disease detection, improved diagnostic accuracy and treatment options, along with reduced healthcare costs.”

The product will fully launch in 2021.

“We are fueled by the positive feedback related to our beta launch and validation of our first product’s capabilities as demonstrated through published accomplishments of our early adopters and industry recognition and awards,” said CEO Melissa Sherman in a statement. “This round of financing will augment our sales and marketing efforts and accelerate the development of second-generation products.”

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TrekIT Health, creators of a digital platform through which an entire medical team could access documents and care instructions for patients, has raised $1 million in additional seed funding.

The round was led by Tech Council Ventures with participation from Boston Millennia Partners Founders Fund and Front Row Fund, who join existing investors including IP Group, DreamIT Health and Ben Franklin Technology Partners.

The company made Technical.ly’s RealLIST Startups top-10 list in 2019, and is based on the research work of founder Dr. Subha Airan-Javia, who now holds the role of CEO.

“We are excited to have the support of investors experienced in the healthcare industry as we look to grow TrekIT’s impact on care delivery,” Airan-Javia said in a statement. Electronic health records “have traditionally been built to optimize the business of healthcare, which of course, is important. However, with rising levels of clinician burnout and increasing demands on time, particularly now in the setting of the pandemic, it is imperative to provide our frontline workers with tools to enable them to focus on patient care instead of cumbersome administrative work, which wastes multiple hours each day.”