San Fransico-based medical search engine Healthline (launched in October 2005) just raised $14 million in a recapitalized Series A round of financing. They also are written up by Bob Tedeschi in tomorrow’s New York Times.
The round was led by Vantage Point. Reed Elsevier and Mitsui (Mitsui recently invested in Feedster as well) also participated in the round.
This was a recap round for Healthline, which has raised a total of around $30 million since its founding in 1999. It is an absolutely wonderful search engine.
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Doesn’t look like they index Wikipedia… which makes no sense.
That said… $14M… that’s a huge chunk of stock and control someone just gave away
Gotta love VC !
Their integration of the ontology with the search engine and combination of vetted content with crawled content looks excellent. I’m really impressed with the site.
Still, acquiring users (for all vertical search engines, not just Healthline) will be hard work. Hopefully a lot of that $14M is earmarked for marketing/PR…
The problem with HealthLine, WebMD, Google and their ilk is that they simply serve up what amounts to a “medical encyclopedia”.
That’s good and accurate, but not really helpful to regular people, who need more interactive and down-to-earth explaination of their health choices.
Watch us do just that (www.healthvoices.com)
Kevin, no more free rides to Atherton for you my friend! Looking forward to discussing this with you 2/4 in PA.
Dan, thanks for the kind words! And, you’re right; getting the message out, affordably, is tough. We’re tryin!