Big Health

Digital health company Big Health today announces a new round of $12 million led by Octopus Ventures with Kaiser Permanente Ventures, returning investor Index Ventures, as well as Sean Duffy (CEO, Omada Health) and JamJar Investments, the UK-based investment fund of the innocent drinks founders. They join existing investors Esther Dyson and Peter Read.
Co-founded by Peter Hames (an NHS Innovation Fellow) and Professor Colin Espie (University of Oxford) Big Health is a pioneer in "digital medicine." By automating evidence-based, non-drug solutions like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Big Health is making them as scalable and accessible as pharmaceuticals. Gold-standard clinical trials demonstrate that Big Health's programs are extremely effective, leading to a majority of sufferers achieving good mental health.
Big Health's first product, Sleepio, is a digital sleep improvement program which helps users overcome poor sleep, and in the process improve their mental health and wellbeing. In the world's first placebo-group randomized controlled trial (RCT) for a digital sleep program, Sleepio was shown to be comparable in effect to in-person CBT, with 76 percent of insomnia sufferers achieving healthy sleep (Espie, 2012), and in a separate study shown to be effective in helping anxiety sufferers reduce their symptoms (Pillai, 2015). Most recently Sleepio was shown to be effective in the workplace, with a RCT at a Fortune 500 company demonstrating significant improvements in sleep and productivity for Sleepio users (Bostock, 2016). To date, Big Health has 14 published peer-reviewed papers -- the leading evidence base of any digital therapeutic addressing mental health. For more information https://www.bighealth.com/about-us/