Hello Heart raises $70m.

Israeli digital heart-disease management company Hello Heart has announced the completion of a $70 million financing round led by the Stripes private-equity fund.

Hello Heart was founded in 2013 by CEO Maayan Cohen, Ziv Meltzer and Eran Keisar. The company has raised $138m. to date from investors, including IVP, Maven Ventures, BlueRun Ventures and Resolute Ventures.

Founded in Israel, the company’s R&D center remains in the country, although its marketing and sales operations are headquartered in the US. Hello Heart has 130 employees, with about one-third of them in Israel.

Hello Heart has annual revenue of tens of millions of dollars from its heart-disease management system, which identifies high blood pressure, excessive cholesterol and other phenomena associated with heart disease. It initially marketed directly to consumers, but the company now sells to insurance companies and employers.

Cohen discovered the need for digital medical management when her late husband, Oren, was suffering from a brain tumor. She was tasked with running around amassing documents and tests, tracking treatments, medicines and arranging surgery and trying to make sense of it all.

“Doctors don’t know how to help in the daily management of the disease because it’s not their area of specialization,” she said. “And people don’t have the tools to understand what they need to do, and they despair, and there is a lot of nonsense going on. Somebody has to help them to take clinical research and explain the operational significance from their point of view.”

But that is not exactly what Hello Heart does, Cohen said.

“We began with a very big task: to help people manage their health,” she said. “Gradually, we understood that we have to focus to more precisely understand our customer. We noticed that about half of our users began using the product to monitor their blood pressure, and that seemed like the right market for us.” (Globes/TNS)