CancerIQ: Why We Invested

By Elizabeth Coston McCluskey and Tasha Seitz

10% of people have a genetic predisposition to breast, ovarian or colon cancer, and the field of genetic testing to identify those populations is moving very quickly. Understanding an individual’s risk factors through genetic testing can inform a personalized cancer screening and care plan that will increase the odds of early detection and enhance survival rates, yet many individuals whose family histories suggest they are candidates are not being tested. This issue disproportionately affects African American women, who have three times the genetic risk of early onset, aggressive breast and ovarian cancers. Even when individuals do get tested for hereditary cancer risk, they often aren’t receiving care plans that reflect current national recommendations as the field is evolving and there are not enough professional genetic counselors to meet demand.

Solution

CancerIQ’s workflow process automation system — developed for cancer centers, breast centers and OB/GYN practices — collects family history information and automatically identifies patients who qualify for genetic testing, then streamlines the genetic test ordering process and records test results alongside recommendations for care plans based on the test results (whether positive or negative), and helps providers track and manage patient adherence to care plans to ultimately reduce risk over time. By streamlining the upfront process for genetic testing and leveraging technology to connect with current national recommendations, CancerIQ ensures that more individuals have the appropriate, personalized care plans in place to detect cancer early and treat it more successfully — or prevent it from occurring in the first place.

Why We Invested

Each year, over 450,000 Americans are diagnosed with breast, ovarian or colorectal cancer, and CancerIQ’s platform enables patients to take advantage of genetic screening and has the potential to drive early detection and improve survival rates. The company was founded by a strong mother-daughter team with both business and medical credentials. Dr. Funmi Olopade, a founder and board member, is a professor of medicine and human genetics and director of the University of Chicago’s Cancer Risk Clinic and has led important research in the field regarding hereditary cancer risk for specific patient populations. She has been part of a collaboration to create training in genetic counseling to generate more capacity to conduct, interpret and apply genetic risk screening to develop personalized patient care plans. Feyi Olopade Ayodele leads the company as founder and CEO and has a background in private equity and investment banking. Prior to launching CancerIQ, she served as project manager at the University of Chicago’s Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics where she developed a data platform to drive medical research in oncology. Ayodele and her mother — who took a sabbatical from the University of Chicago — joined with analytics specialist Haibo Lu to start CancerIQ.

The company has strong customer traction (30+ multi-year contracts, and renewal revenues and internal expansion across multiple health systems) and a distribution partnership with Myriad, the largest genetic testing provider. This partnership has the potential to accelerate adoption of CancerIQ in the market, and the company is already generating new customer opportunities from that relationship. They are also in late-stage discussions with a second large genetic testing partner and other specialty HIT vendors that will provide them additional reach into the market.

Finally, the field of genetic testing and understanding of hereditary risk factors is advancing quickly, and we believe that CancerIQ’s technology can successfully address the limited supply of professional genetic counselors by automating the process around testing and recommendations.

Traction

CancerIQ has several dozen paying customers, who have have screened over 150,000 patients and ordered more than 6,000 genetic tests. The Myriad relationship has potential to accelerate customer adoption. The value the company has created for Myriad has made it compelling for other genetic testing labs to partner with CancerIQ, and a number of additional potential partnerships are now in their pipeline.

Impact

Earlier diagnosis of patients with high hereditary cancer risk will lead to better health outcomes, and the company conducted a two-year study with OSF HealthCare’s Center for Breast Health to demonstrate their ability to enable early detection. Dr. Olopade’s research suggests that CancerIQ can have a disproportionately higher impact on African and African American populations, given their higher risk for early onset, aggressive cancers. In addition to financial metrics, we expect to track the number of patients screened by ethnicity, geography and customer type, the number of patients implementing personalized care plans based on CancerIQ recommendations, and the number of patients diagnosed early.

Glimpse: Why We Invested

At Impact Engine, one of our four impact areas of focus is education. Time and time again, we have heard from companies that the best edtech products have to fight against mediocre ones because of the relationship-based nature of sales in many school districts. The reality underlying that frustration is that administrators haven’t had great tools to foster informed decision making. Traditional achievement systems simply present outcomes without capturing the data in the context of what educators or programs did and how effective their actions were at impacting student outcomes. At the same time, traditional financial systems have lacked the correlations between expenditures and student achievement. As a result, districts have struggled to align their spending on products and programs that produce the best student outcomes.

Solution

Our most recent investment in Glimpse seeks to address that challenge. Glimpse has developed a data platform that connects budgeting systems with data on student outcomes, enabling districts and schools to calculate an eROI, or education return on investment. What drew us to this investment was the potential for systems change within education. By providing data to districts, Glimpse enables decision makers to include impact in their purchase decisions, and it also helps them ask the right questions when they see discrepancies in performance within or across schools. The US spent $12 billion on edtech alone in 2017, and that figure is substantially higher when you consider spending on programs and curriculum. We believe Glimpse has the potential to meaningfully impact how those dollars are spent.

Why We Invested

In addition to the compelling market opportunity and potential for impact, we were impressed by the team. The company is led by co-founders Nicole Pezant and Adam Pearson, both experienced edtech entrepreneurs who previously worked together at Chalkable. They’ve demonstrated an ability to grow and scale (and exit) companies in this space, and we are excited to work with them. Despite a small team size, the company had already achieved meaningful traction by the time we invested.

Impact

While Glimpse is able to infer correlations, they are not utilizing randomized control trials (RCTs) and do not purport to evaluate causality. However, they do provide a more granular level of detail that helps administrators connect the dots between spending and outcomes. To that end, the impact metrics that we are tracking for the company include the spending efficiency or eROI (the % of spend that is driving student gains); the number of districts using Glimpse, including a breakdown of Title 1 schools and the number of students within each district; and improvements in student performance.

Our Investment

We invested in the seed round that Glimpse raised earlier this summer which will enable the company to invest in product, grow sales, and demonstrate improvement in spending efficiency at customers. We look forward to supporting the company alongside co-investors Fresco Capital, Govtech Fund and GSV AcceleraTE.

Fixer: Why We Invested

The United States is currently faced with an alarming labor shortage of skilled workers in the trades. Over 60% of skilled tradesmen are over the age of 44, and the industry will struggle to fill these roles as younger generations continue to seek employment in other industries. 78% of firms report having difficulty finding qualified workers to fill these types of positions. The construction industry lost 1.5 million workers during the Great Recession. As a result, skilled trade jobs have consistently ranked as the most difficult position to fill since 2010, with 62% of companies struggling to fill these positions.

Solution

Fixer offers a compelling, scalable solution to address this labor gap by providing a career entry point and development for women and minorities while also delivering a superior customer experience. Their on-demand home repair service features transparent pricing as well as convenient online booking and payment. The company identifies overlooked talent and develops their skills with progressive training in customer service, home repair, and maintenance. “Fixers” (the employees of Fixer who provide handyperson services) have access to a variety of learning opportunities, ranging from informal sessions with fellow workers, to online courses and classroom-based certification training provided by the company. The curriculum also includes work in the field with mentors in order to gain hands-on experience. Ultimately, customers benefit from Fixer’s intensive training program in the form of impeccable service and high quality of work.

Why We Invested

Fixer boasts an extremely strong management team. The company was founded by Mike Evans (co-founder and former COO of GrubHub) and a handful of ex-GrubHub product, operations, engineering and marketing veterans who have a proven track record of success. Also, Fixer is seizing a large, attractive market opportunity by vying to become a nationwide, customer-service oriented brand for home maintenance and repair. In addition to their impressive management team and the large market opportunity, we are also excited about the potential for impact at scale. Since there is a limited supply of experienced tradesmen, Fixer’s focus on recruiting underrepresented populations to join the trades as novice fixers becomes a clear competitive advantage for the company.

Impact

Fixer’s goal is to bring more people into the trades, giving them measurable and valuable skills, which will provide them greater economic security and mobility, particularly for those currently earning less than $50,000 per year, as well as for underrepresented populations such as women and minorities. Typically, we invest in products where the customer is “buying the impact” (e.g. a school administrator wants better education outcomes), so that the impact is directly driven by sales. In Fixer’s case, the customer is buying a convenient service, but because there is a shortage of skilled handy-people, the social impact is a key requirement for Fixer to grow its business (i.e. they must successfully train people to provide a great service).

One of the biggest variables on impact will be who those employees are and whether the company is hiring the underserved. The leadership team at Fixer has a strong commitment to impact, and to reflect that commitment, the company registered as a public benefit corporation. As the training gets underway, we plan to track the number and type of new practical skills acquired by Fixers, as well as the demographics of those entering or re-entering the trades.

Our Investment

We invested in the seed round that Fixer raised in May, which will allow them to continue to grow the business, to refine their model, to build out the curriculum for their training academy, and to hire their first group of novice fixers. We look forward to working with Mike and the rest of the Fixer team as they continue to grow the business alongside co-investors Founder Collective and Hyde Park Venture Partners.