Tilak Healthcare Secures $2.7M in Venture Funding to Build Chronic Disease Screening Platform Through Gamification

VCBeat has learned that French startup Tilak Healthcare recently secured $2.7 million in venture capital from the iBionext Growth Fund. Established by France’s iBionext Network, the fund is dedicated to supporting promising healthcare startups. So, what kind of company is Tilak Healthcare?

As one of the youngest startups in the iBionext ecosystem, founded in May 2016, the company is positioned as a standard medical gaming ecosystem, providing screening, monitoring, and follow-up treatment solutions for chronic diseases through an electronic gaming platform.

Edouard Gasse, the company’s CEO, was formerly the Head of Design at Gameloft Madrid, a video game development and publishing studio. He is also a columnist for TechCrunch France, covering mobile applications and entertainment. In 2011, he founded Productism, a social commerce website.

After joining Tilak Healthcare, Edouard successfully established a professional team comprising gaming experts and medical specialists to jointly develop medical mobile game apps for the diagnosis and assessment of certain chronic diseases.

Tilak’s inaugural game screens for ocular diseases by monitoring visual parameters of the retinal macula. Patients complete a series of game levels on a mobile device, during which the application captures changes in their macular visual parameters and relays this data to physicians on a remote platform.

Note: The macula is an oval-shaped disc located on the retina at the back of the eye. At the center of the macula lies a small elliptical depression called the fovea, where vision is most precise and acute.

Edouard Gasser stated, “Given Tilak’s unique positioning in the digital health sector, we are proud to introduce video games and entertainment initiatives into the healthcare domain. With the support of the iBionext Growth Fund, we will make mobile gaming a valuable adjunct tool for healthcare.”

Tila’s ultimate goal is to create a comprehensive medical gaming ecosystem for the screening and prevention of specific chronic diseases. Similar to U.S.-based companies such as Akili Interactive and Pear Therapeutics, Tila aims to seamlessly integrate medicine with cloud computing to deliver digital therapeutics to a large patient population.

To achieve regulatory clearance for the product as a medical device, the company must obtain approval from the relevant regulatory authorities (or establish strategic partnerships to circumvent this requirement); however, neither Tilak nor iBionext has disclosed detailed progress on this effort. Currently, Tilak has collaborated with several medical research institutions, including the Institut de la Vision, the Quinze-Vingts National Ophthalmology Hospital, and StreetLab under the Quinze-Vingts umbrella, to jointly evaluate the product’s performance.

Alexia Perouse, CEO of the iBionext Growth Foundation, stated in a press release: “We firmly believe in the potential of Tilak Healthcare. Its well-established team has accelerated the development of its patient-provider platform, demonstrating that we made the right investment. The integration of video games and medicine holds immense promise, and Tilak Healthcare is poised to become a leader in the field of medical mobile gaming.”