Glooko Attracts New CEO, $100M Series F FinancingGlooko Attracts New CEO, $100M Series F Financing

Mike Alvarez has worked in medtech for almost 30 years, with more than 20 of those years spent at large-tier companies like St. Jude Medical (acquired by Abbott) and Medtronic, where he saw those companies using digital platforms that are proprietary to their own devices. Then, during the pandemic, he served as CEO at Qardio where he saw the ability to reach a lot of patients using wearables, collecting big data, and delivering that to the providers in a meaningful way.

“One of the things that is a challenge for healthcare providers as well as patients is the inability to immediately access all their devices,” Alvarez said.

Today, Alvarez is the new CEO at Palo Alto, CA-based Glooko, a digital health company with a device agnostic strategy of allowing all devices to connect to its platform. The company also just closed a $100 million series F financing.

“It kind of takes the Tower of Babel concept out of healthcare for the clinician and for the patient,” Alvarez told MD+DI. “So, you know, you have over 200 devices on our platform. You can imagine that if you're a clinician and you have 1,000 patients that you're following, it's very possible that they have a couple of hundred different devices that they have to deal with. So, they have to go on every individual one — especially when you get the elderly patients and they have to remember their password — So, Glooko really got it right as far as taking away the difficulty of dealing with a chronic disease by making this device agnostic.”

Image courtesy of Glooko

Glooko isn’t the first company to do it this way, but it is the largest. Also, he said, each of those proprietary platforms shows the data in a slightly different way. Physicians have told him that they’ve had to train their staff because a line chart on one device may not be equivalent to what another line chart on another device means. That’s a big deal when the clinicians are trying to track a patient’s glucose over time

“So, I just see that Glooko made dealing with chronic diseases easier and that's what healthcare today is all about,” Alvarez said.

Another component of what attracted him to Glooko is the company’s scale. Already, Glooko is in 30 countries and more than 10,000 clinics worldwide, with more than 4 million diabetes patients on its platform.

“We’ve started this life sciences business where we’ve taken that data and we’re taking the ability to use real world data, real world evidence, to provide clinical trial support,” Alvarez said. “We have completed over 20 clinical trials, we're getting ready to launch in the first quarter of 2025 our trial sync app, which is going to make getting patients up and running on a clinical trial quicker and easier, which is what life science companies want.”

Alvarez said Glooko calls it a flywheel or ecosystem.

“You start with all of these clinics, all of these patients providing all of this data, and then go back to the life science companies that provide the tools to mine that data for their clinical trials. It's very compelling.”

Image courtesy of Glooko

Glooko’s series F financing round led by Georgian with investments from Health Catalyst Capital, Canaan, and others, is expected to support Glooko’s continued growth and product expansion in expert data insights, device integrations, clinical research, and chronic condition support for healthcare providers around the world.

Glooko said the funding, coupled with the appointment of Alvarez as CEO, will allow the company to accelerate global product expansion of its digital healthcare platform and life sciences work, which empowers people with diabetes to better manage their condition and strengthen engagement with and care from their healthcare team.

“Today, more than 537 million adults worldwide are diagnosed with diabetes, and the numbers are projected to grow every year,” said Simon Chong, co-founder at Georgian and chairman of the board for Glooko. “The need for timely, comprehensive, and integrated support for healthcare practitioners is critical. Mike brings significant industry expertise, proven leadership and commercial success across chronic condition management and population health, as well as experience with advanced data management technologies. We believe Mike is the right leader at a key inflection point for Glooko and look forward to working with him.”