Today we are announcing 3Derm’s acquisition by Digital Diagnostics. We feel so fortunate to be joining an incredible team of brilliant visionaries, engineers, and commercial powerhouses with a shared mission to increase patients’ access to healthcare with telemedicine and autonomous AI. You can read more about the deal here, but a quick recap on our journey:
At the beginning, Elliot Swart and I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Everyone told us that medical device startups take a decade to exit. After only eight years, it feels good to say we really showed them.
3Derm began as a hobby project where we built medical devices out of spare parts from web cameras and plastic we melted in our dorm microwaves. When we pitched the idea for a standardized teledermatology system and were named finalists in a big medical device competition (CIMIT), we kicked it into high gear. In less than four months we made a functional prototype, wrote teledermatology software, obtained IRB approval, and ran a 50-patient clinical study. We were heading into our junior year when CIMIT gave us $100k to take the idea even further – we were hooked.
Once they saw we were on to something, Yale mobilized engineering, clinical, and entrepreneurial resources to help us form a company, and made a critical introduction to Healthbox, a healthcare incubator backed by BCBSMA. Soon we were pitching Blue Cross executives. We walked out of that meeting with our first investment.