BioDigital Announces $4M Funding to Create a 3D Model of the Human Body

BioDigital, Inc. announced they’ve received $4MM in Series A funding led by FirstMark Capital with participation from the NYU Venture Fund and a number of prominent angel investors.

According to the announcement, BioDigital has been pioneering the use of 3D technology to simplify health concepts for a decade.  Regardless of the customer the underlying problem remained the same: traditional methods of communicating health information were no longer adequate. Furthermore, the consumer appetite for information is unprecedented, but the format its delivered in is hard to digest. 3D technology has already changed the face of games, movies and with geo-browsers like Google Earth the way we navigate our planet, but nowhere does 3D make more sense than in representing the human body. The body is a dynamic, complex system and understanding it using text and static 2D illustration is inherently flawed. BioDigital has been fortunate over the last decade to provide innovative solutions to this problem to a range of healthcare customers such as hospitals, medical schools, device and pharma.

Two years ago, BioDigital reports that it saw some profound changes happening in the development of the Web. For the first time, as part of the HTML5 spec,  3D would be natively supported in browsers. Cloud and API based businesses also emerged. BioDigital opines that technology is clearly entering a new phase of the web: a services oriented model which leverages rich interactive media as a better means of conveying information. BioDigital reports these trends inspired it to take its IP  built over the years and create the definitive place for immersive health content on the Web, which is called the BioDigital Human Platform.

BioDigital reports that since its launch 12 months ago, the Human has exceeded expectations. More than one million members have joined across an array of use cases. Students from over 2500 schools are using it to learn anatomy; consumers are using it to understand and share everything from fitness to health conditions; healthcare providers are now introducing it within their clinics to better communicate with their patients.

Building the first true 3D virtual body platform that finally allows people to see what’s happening below our skin is a massive undertaking, according to the company blog. BioDigital says the investment will allow it to accelerate the development of features and API functionality requested by its users while furthering its mission to make health and human body understandable to everyone.