Massive Health: raised funding, spending it on new hires

Aza and I have spent the last few weeks trekking up and down Sand Hill road, speaking with investors and looking for firms and individuals who share our mission to help people get healthy, and can help us build a great company. As a result, we’re excited that we’ve raised a $2.25 MM seed round from Felicis VC, Greylock Discovery Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Charles River Ventures and the newly minted Collaborative Fund. (We’ve also got some amazing angels behind us... but our PR folks have asked us to keep the list short ;-)

And now that we are funded, we are hiring.

Our goal at Massive Health is to bring the kind of innovation we expect from the Internet world to health care. As Aza mentioned, we’re excited encourage a design renaissance to health care. We’re also excited to bring “big-data” analysis and other techniques to discover insights that improves lives. Crowdsourcing, game mechanics, and social networking are cool, but applying it to help someone get and stay healthy? That’s exciting. That’s powerful.

There are some great companies in the consumer health space today, so what makes us different? Massive Health sits at the intersection of health care and consumer products. There are some great wellness and fitness apps out there. Whether it’s Nike+, or Cyclemeter (my personal favourite), if you want an app to help you get and stay active, you’re spoiled for choice. But what if you’re actually ill? Then there’s nothing sleek or sexy to help you manage your disease. You’re back to the world of clinical health applications that aren’t especially friendly, easy to understand or use, and certainly aren’t social. Today’s apps don’t appreciate that you’re a person. That’s simply not good enough.

We’re not proposing giving you a badge for eating your broccoli or letting you check-in and become duke of ranch dressing. Tweeting the details of your health isn’t particularly useful either. We are talking about tight feedback loopsand deep insight into the interface which is your body. There is something magical in the intersection of health, motivation, data analysis, and your social graph. That’s where habits are formed, behaviors are changed, and people get healthy.

Doug Soo - our engineering lead - was employee #6 at Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. They make enormously scalable systems and a product that’s fundamentally about people. It’s not a coincidence that he’s joined us.

We’re still in ninja mode, so we’re keeping the specifics under wraps. What we can say is that we’re looking for great people who believe in the social mission of helping people get healthier. Not just for wellness, but for the real health problems that plague our nation and the world. If our mission resonates with you, and you’re a great engineer with a lot of passion, we’d be honored if you’d check out our open jobs list. Otherwise, stay tuned... we’re excited to share more soon!