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After launching nearly a year ago, consumer health platform Citizen Health announced a $14.5 million seed funding round to build out its promise to the rare disease community of helping navigate patient care journeys.

Transformation Capital led the funding round, with other investors including Wavemaker 360, the startup said Tuesday morning.

Citizen Health, which spun out from health data hub Ciitizen late last year, allows patients to manage their clinical data, imaging, genetic information and patient-reported outcomes in a singular AI-powered knowledge base.

The platform also connects patients to others in the rare disease community to serve as a one-stop-shop for shared experiences. 

Ultimately, the company hopes to use those insights to arm researchers with more information to accelerate the development of new treatments.

In addition to the funding round, the startup announced a partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a philanthropic organization owned by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and its rare disease arm known as the Rare as One Project.

Co-founders Farid Vij and Nasha Fitter believe Citizen Health’s approach to patient health data is what differentiates it from competitors in the space. 

Any use of consumer data is “driven by patient consent,” they noted, and it is licensed to pharma companies rather than sold.

“We share revenue back with the patients and if the patients are connected to an advocacy group, we also share revenue with that advocacy group,” Fitter explained. “It’s a complete circle, and that’s a big reason why the company name is ‘Citizen.’ It’s about giving the power back to the patients and putting them at the center.”

Vij, who is also CEO of the company, added that the company’s goal is that patients remain in control of their data and can direct how it’s used.

“With the complete patient picture, you can start to personalize what treatments may make sense for them and help patients connect with one another to navigate a particularly challenging situation,” Vij said.

Rare disease remains an unmet need, with 95% of the more than 10,000 illnesses lacking Food and Drug Administration-approved therapies to treat them. As a result, patients with rare diseases are often scrambling to find care pathways.

The experience is personal for Fitter, whose eight-year-old daughter suffers from an ultra-rare neurodevelopment disorder that results in seizures, cognitive delays and difficulty walking. 

Keeping track of her daughter’s medical information as she went from specialist to specialist was a “nightmare,” Fitter said.

Those challenges spurred her to join Ciitizen, which was originally launched in 2017 to “put the power of medical data in the hands of the patient.” 

At the time, its investors included Verily, Google’s life sciences research organization, as well as a16z and Section 32.

Invitae acquired Ciitizen in 2021 for $325 million, and announced two years later that it would be divesting the platform as part of its strategic efforts to streamline operations and “reduce operating cash burn.”

Vij noted that he and Fitter were able to reacquire a number of the assets they built under Ciitizen in order to then launch Citizen Health.

“Nasha and I had been talking about a much bigger vision we wanted to pursue where we could leverage the knowledge base we were building through all of this data,” he explained. “We very much view it as a new beginning for us on a similar mission.”

Vij describes the platform experience for patients as similar to people using social media platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram — ultimately allowing patients to collect all their data and share it with their respective care teams and providers for personalized care.

With Citizen Health, Fitter said she has “everything on her phone,” including her daughter’s MRI images, which alleviates a considerable amount of patient burden.

The other critical component of Citizen Health is its partnerships with pharma companies to assist drug discovery and development. 

The platform has the ability to help companies populate their investigational new drug (IND) applications to the FDA in order to launch clinical trials, including helping pharma players understand patient populations and select their endpoints.

Citizen Health will also aim to follow certain patients as they try gene therapies over the course of years to help advise researchers.

Thus far, the platform has worked with Praxis Precision Medicines in filing its application for its antisense oligonucleotide for an ultra-rare form of epilepsy. It has also partnered with AstraZeneca in targeting the rare cancer cholangiocarcinoma in order to “help follow patients and see how they’re doing in the real world after treatment,” Fitter said.