London-based Gripable, a healthcare startup that provides rehabilitation programmes to people with neurological and musculoskeletal conditions, announced on Monday that it has raised $11M (approximately €10M) in its Series A round of funding.
The startup says the funds will help it to expand its data platform and therapy services, with a particular focus on growing markets in Europe and the US.
The company has raised a total of $17.5M to date, with $4M raised in private investment and $2.5M in government grants. The company has also been awarded a $1M grant to develop paediatric capabilities. Paediatrics is the branch of medicine that involves the medical care of infants, children, and adolescents.
Gripable claims to have a period of significant activity in the US, including a recent partnership with medical equipment distributor, Medline. Besides, the company also became a part of a pioneering group of healthtech companies led by the ABHI, with recent trade missions to the US accelerating the company’s traction with both national payers and providers.
Investors in this round
The round was led by IP Group, with equal investment from Parkwalk Advisors.
IP Group develops science and technology businesses across life sciences, technology and cleantech. The group has invested in a number of high-profile companies, including Oxford Nanopore Technologies plc. The group also owns Parkwalk, the UK’s largest growth EIS fund manager, which claims to back ‘world-changing’ technologies emerging from the UK’s ‘leading’ universities and research institutions.
With £360M of assets under management, the firm has invested in over 140 companies across its flagship Parkwalk Opportunities EIS Fund as well as the enterprise and innovation funds Parkwalk manages for the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol, and Imperial College.
Parkwalk invests in businesses creating solutions to real-world challenges, with IP-protected innovations, across a range of sectors including life sciences, AI, quantum computing, advanced materials, genomics, cleantech, future of mobility, medtech, and big data.
Martin Glen, Investment Director at Parkwalk Advisors, says, “Parkwalk is excited to be backing this breakthrough digital rehabilitation technology as it grows and enters new markets. We are hopeful that GripAble can reproduce its strong initial success in the UK in the significantly larger US market. This would enable many more patients to access the sustained level of rehabilitation therapy that they require for a positive outcome post-injury.”
GripAble was an early investment in the Parkwalk-managed Imperial College Innovation Fund and is the second such company to receive further investment from Parkwalk.
A mobile platform for assessment and training of hand and arm functions
Founded in 2016 by Mike Mace and Paul Rinne, GripAble is a startup digitising rehabilitation from hospital to home. The company’s digital platform, which includes bespoke hand-held sensors, mobile hardware, software, in-built gamification, and data services, enables home-based rehabilitation. This allows more patients to access gold standard care from professional therapists for longer periods, driving improved outcomes, while decreasing the burden on healthcare systems.
GripAble’s hardware is IP protected and has patents in the US, EU, and China. The devices are bought by healthcare facilities for therapists and medical practitioners to use with their patients. The devices can also be bought directly by the patient.
Paul Rinne says, “Patients with physical and cognitive impairments require guided therapy to improve their quality of life. Simply put, the more rehab they do and the more they adhere to professional guidance, the greater their chances of having better outcomes, with a wealth of evidence backing this up.”
“However, due to resource costs and poor logistics, current health systems cannot deliver the amount of therapy needed, with significant backlogs, and few patients receiving anywhere near what they require to get better. This is a common problem faced by hundreds of millions of patients around the world, with inefficient care pathways not only costing health systems hundreds of billions of dollars every year, but costing people a chance to live their lives to their full potential,” Rinne adds.
GripAble has been tested and developed over the last seven years in partnership with thousands of occupational and physical therapists, and patients across multiple clinical conditions and leading academic institutions, including Imperial College London, and within Imperial Healthcare NHS Trust. GripAble’s partners are Imperial College London, Innovate UK, NHS, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Oxford Technology, and Triple Point Social Impact Fund.
Paul adds, “The evidence is clear. The new funding will accelerate GripAble’s journey to delivering end-to-end patient care and connecting millions to their own personal home-based clinic. We welcome IP Group and Parkwalk, who have a wealth of insight and experience that will support us in growing our industry-leading platform in the US market and enable us to expand our clinical and commercial evidence base.”
Growth and development
With an eight-fold increase in patient training through its platform, and following rapid provider adoption in the UK, GripAble has managed to sign partnerships with both multinational pharmaceutical companies and distributors.
Currently, GripAble delivers a full range of services to nearly 1,000 customers and has already achieved considerable neurological, musculoskeletal and paediatric care provider adoption across NHS and private healthcare.
To date, the company has been used by more than 8,000 individuals with over 109,000 activity sessions and close to 7,000 hours of training completed, representing over 27 million movement repetitions.
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