Bethesda healthtech company Mytonomy raised $25M Series B, plans hiring

Bethesda, Maryland-based Mytonomy closed on $25 million in a Series B investment round led by Level Equity. The company last raised in 2017, with a $7 million Series A led by Philips.

Cofounder and CEO Anjali Kataria said that Mytonomy, a software as a service company that offers video-based patient engagement, decided to raise the round after such strong growth in 2020. The company’s videos are designed to help patients understand their issues before they go to a hospital or care center, or help decipher post-care instructions. Kataria said this coincides with the accelerated trend of homes becoming the epicenter of care.

“I come from a medical family, I’ve been in healthcare my whole life…It’s really phenomenal that we’re witnessing so much change out of COVID,” Kataria told Technica.ly. “It started before COVID, but COVID was really the catalyst around the home.”

The company was originally founded in 2011 by a former Google employee with an edtech-based approach. But when Kataria joined in 2016, she saw an opportunity in the healthcare industry for the company’s communication and survey tools, along with its video studio. Its model, called Cloud for Healthcare, asynchronously adapts to each patient’s needs, with five different cloud options. Mytomony currently offers a B2B2C model, working with hospitals and remote monitoring clinics, but also engaging directly with patients.

The idea seems to have paid off, since Kataria said the company was growing 100% year over year even before COVID. In 2020, Mytonomy doubled its employee size to 57 personnel.

“[I saw] that if we could reconfigure the model around patient instruction, it could solve a massive gap that existed in the patient experience of how to interpret and translate all the instructions that you’re given and carry them out so you’re applying your discharge instructions so you can actually lead a healthier life,” Kataria said.

Anjali Kataria. (Courtesy photo)

According to Kataria, the funding will be used for product innovation, including analyzing a large portion of data Mytonomy has collected over the years, and also building a more robust communications and research cloud. Primarily, though, it will be used for hiring the close to 20 new positions Mytonomy plans to have opening as it continues to grow.

“We’re on a rocket ship,” Kataria said of digital health. “…There’s this huge growth area occurring in virtual care remote clinics where hospitals, the private sector and retailers are creating these healthcare delivery models to reach people.”

The reason for such strong growth at the company, Kataria said, is the approach of providing a software platform, and pairing it with the massive engagement of streaming. But through the video studio, she also wants to take on the massive amounts of misinformation surrounding healthcare, increase access to correct information and restore some faith in healthcare providers. In addition to the health professionals providing the data, which is peer-reviewed, Kataria said many on the video team in the company’s studio come from previous gigs at Universal, Netflix, National Geographic and Amazon Prime.

Streaming, Kataria said, “becomes a stepstool for all people to be able to access information in ways that they couldn’t before.”

“Not everyone is going to understand a three-ring binder after they’ve had a heart procedure…but we believe we can send them home now with virtual tools that can guide them through the use of entertaining content,” she said.