With nearly 90% of Americans at risk of developing type-2 diabetes and affecting 29M Americans, diabetes has definitely taken its toll. But while this may seem bleak, the silver lining is that type 2 diabetes is completely preventable by changing your dietary habits and Blue Mesa Health is leading the charge. With their digital diabetes prevention program, Blue Mesa partners with your doctor to provide health coaches, wireless scales, and fitness tracker software to measure and change your dietary habits. With type-2 diabetes affecting more and more Americans, it is time to start fighting diabetes before it fights you.
AlleyWatch spoke with founder and CEO Curtis Duggan about the company and their most recent round of funding.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We’ve raised $750K in our seed round of funding and are closing some more this quarter. Our investors include Blueprint Health, Mobio Technologies, Pallasite Ventures, Redbrick Media, Stanley Park Ventures and John R. Patrick. Given the traction we are seeing, I imagine we will be raising a Series A this year as well.
Tell us about your product or service.
Blue Mesa Health delivers a science-based, technology-enabled digital diabetes prevention program to prediabetic individuals. Our remote program, based on the CDC’s National Diabetes Prevention Program, provides individuals with a year-long program delivered by a dedicated health coach. The program is aimed at reducing the risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes. In addition to the remote health coach, we deliver a wireless scale and FitBit to the participants’ home and leverage this technology to help them through our 16-week curriculum with the goal of instilling sustainable healthy behaviors and a reduction from starting weight of 5-7% body weight. A description of the features of our product alone, however, are not sufficient to encapsulate the impact of what we do: we are fundamentally outcomes-focused, and all of these features serve to guide our outcomes: 78% of our participants reach 5.2% body weight loss at six months into the program.
What inspired you to start the company?
My inspiration to start Blue Mesa Health was two-fold. In recent years, I’ve watched several family members and relatives pass away from lung cancer, among other chronic diseases. Although lung cancer is not a disease generally associated with prediabetes, it’s a disease that is largely the result of behavioral choices, just as prediabetes is. I felt drawn to leverage my experience in product and in mobile across a variety of industries to help others change their behavior and prevent chronic disease. This experience is something I gained at my previous entrepreneurial venture, a mobile app design agency, which I exited in 2014. After a period of research and reflection on what to do next, I felt inspired by the enormity of the growing crisis of the effects of diabetes on society, leading me to dive in and start Blue Mesa Health.
How is it different?
Blue Mesa is unique in its tailored approach to diabetes prevention. Unlike other digital providers with a fairly one-size-fits-all approach (despite superficial marketing claims to personalization), we have three distinct-from-the-ground-up programs, Transform, Tranformemos, and Transform-By-Mail.
Transform is our flagship Digital Diabetes Prevention Program, a mobile-centered program that places individuals in peer cohorts for continued support.
Transformemos is our Digital Diabetes Prevention Program in Spanish, providing individuals with Spanish-speaking health coaches that are familiar with Latino and Hispanic culture.
Transform-By-Mail is our low-tech platform, providing individuals that are less familiar with mobile applications access to a health coach and weekly lessons through phone calls and mail.
Our approach allows us to create a truly global digital therapeutics company that can address customers, participants and patients in markets globally, with a vision to make diabetes prevention available to all global citizens regardless of age, technology level or language spoken.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We are targeting the global diabetes prevention market, starting with a focus on the US. Digital diabetes prevention is rapidly approaching a $1 billion market size by 2020. If you consider the global market, the market size increases again by an order of magnitude. Currently in 2017, digital diabetes prevention encompasses roughly a 100-150 million dollar market but it is ready to rocket in the next five years. Digital health is truly at the stage where personal computers were in 1980 and where the Internet was in 1992.
What’s your business model?
Our value proposition for the payers in the healthcare…