Chronic illness social platform gets $7M

Patients of Long Covid, autoimmune disorders, Lyme and metabolic diseases will now have a social platform that will allow them to review and share their experiences with various treatment options.  

Eureka Health, which launched earlier this month after raising $7 million in funding, is an AI-powered platform that serves patients with chronic conditions and allows them to review, collaborate, and exchange insights about their journeys with different treatment approaches. 

“Long Covid is painful, debilitating, and can make you feel like you’re losing your mind. That’s a hard thing for people who have never experienced it to understand,” said Beren Airstone, a member of Eureka’s Long Covid community, in the press release. “Eureka is where I go to learn from others going through the same thing. Some people are finding relief from simple treatments while other treatments might be a waste of time or money for someone with my symptoms. Eureka also lets me help others by sharing what I’ve tried.” 

Emerging from stealth, the social platform opened with thousands already involved in their Long Covid group and has since added groups to discuss metabolic disease, autoimmune disorders, and ME/CFS. They plan to add more groups in the near future.  

Angel investors include Co-founder of 23andMe Anne Wojcicki, former CEO of YouTube Susan Wojcicki, and Founder and Chairman of Cancer Commons Marty Tenenbaum. The company says they will use funds to expand their community and treatment discussion groups and “ultimately influence and advance treatment research.” 

A social platform for organic data collection

Eureka was born when founder Zain Memon’s mother was diagnosed with a rare chronic condition.  

“Beyond the basic, first line treatments, which didn’t work, my mom’s doctor had no answers. We were on our own, and that’s a scary, frustrating place to be,” said Zain Memom, Eureka’s co-founder and CEO, in the press release. “Two key learnings stood out: collecting health data is extremely expensive and typically only done in specialized studies on hundreds or thousands of people, which rules out many rare diseases like my mom’s, and the power of community is the best way to offset this deficit.” 

Currently, there are many health groups online through sites like Facebook and Reddit that allow users to share their experiences in receiving treatment for chronic conditions, but Eureka is the first social platform to formalize the data collection process.  

Eureka’s platform relies on a large language model (LLM) to build an extensive database of patient experiences, along with comprehensive reports contributed by the community. 

Eureka says they are continuing to develop their LLM to “interpret and summarize research, match similar patients, and provide personalized predictions of the best treatments.” They eventually plan to develop an AI assistant that will help patients learn the pros and cons of various available treatments.