RightEye’s Parkinson’s test just took a big step forward. Now it's eyeing a $15M funding round.

Dec. 3,  2019  By Sara Gilgore 

Bethesda health tech startup RightEye's test for Parkinson's disease has earned a key win from the Food and Drug Administration, setting the company up for a faster route to market and a new $15 million funding round. 

The FDA deemed the test a breakthrough device, which means that it will have an expedited review process because it addresses a major unmet medical need. The decision thrusts RightEye, whose medical device tracks eye movement to uncover vision behavior, into the clinical diagnostics space for the first time.

Now, the firm is setting out to raise between $10 million and $15 million in a Series B round to accelerate growth and transition “from adolescence to adulthood,” said co-founder and CEO Adam Gross. RightEye has raised $10 million to date.

The new funding would enable the company to expand its sales and marketing efforts. It’s currently operating in the vision care, neurological rehabilitation and performance segments — including its work with Major League Baseball — but plans to push into to the primary care and neurology markets, Gross said. RightEye is looking to double its 25-person team in the next year, which will require a larger headquarters for the business, Gross said. He added that he has no intention to leave Montgomery County.

The capital would also be used to speed up research and development with the company’s machine learning techniques, enhance its eye-tracking technology and, ultimately, deliver more new products like its Parkinson’s disease test.

That test — developed by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth Universityand the Department of Veterans Affairs, funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation and acquired by RightEye in 2016 — measures a person’s ability to follow moving images on a screen. And because research shows a link between Parkinson’s disease and ocular tremors, or the lack of ability to fixate on targets, the test could be used both to diagnose the disease and, potentially, predict it before other symptoms manifest. To that extent, patients with early-stage cases could “begin certain treatments that may exist now, or may not exist for a few years, that can help stave off the symptoms of the disease,” Gross said.

The company will soon begin working with the FDA to secure approval to commercialize the test, which could come by the fourth quarter of 2021. It would follow RightEye’s first FDA green light in October 2018 for its device that detects neurological impairments or advantages in patients, such as reading issues in children or vision skills in athletes.

The FDA’s breakthrough device program helps facilitate the development and commercialization of new technologies. In the case of Parkinson’s, there’s no single test that confirms a diagnosis. The market represents a large opportunity for RightEye, given that Parkinson’s accounts for about $52 billion in health care costs each year, according to the Michael J. Fox Foundation. 

And there are potential applications beyond Parkinson’s, including other neurological conditions associated with eye movement behavior abnormalities such as concussion, Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.

RightEye is also expanding its work in the baseball space, fueled partially by the momentum the Washington Nationals’ World Series win has created, Gross said. RightEye counts the Nats among its clients, and that number has now grown to include about a third of the league’s teams. “We’ve really expanded that, and we’re looking to continue that,” he said.

From the professional level, “we’ll be able to impact more people as we go downstream in the youth sports market,” Gross said. He hopes to grow the firm's work with USA Baseball, the entity that governs amateur baseball, in 2020, along with other sports including softball, soccer, tennis, football and lacrosse. 

Now with 800 users across the U.S. and abroad, RightEye is experiencing 100% year-over-year revenue growth from 2018 to 2019, and projecting another year of near-100% growth in 2020, Gross said, declining to disclose specifics. The company last publicly reported revenue at $5 million in 2016.

Bethesda health tech startup RightEye's test for Parkinson's disease has earned a key win from the Food and Drug Administration, setting the company up for a faster route to market and a new $15 million funding round. 

The FDA deemed the test a breakthrough device, which means that it will have an expedited review process because it addresses a major unmet medical need. The decision thrusts RightEye, whose medical device tracks eye movement to uncover vision behavior, into the clinical diagnostics space for the first time.

Now, the firm is setting out to raise between $10 million and $15 million in a Series B round to accelerate growth and transition “from adolescence to adulthood,” said co-founder and CEO Adam Gross. RightEye has raised $10 million to date.

The new funding would enable the company to expand its sales and marketing efforts. It’s currently operating in the vision care, neurological rehabilitation and performance segments — including its work with Major League Baseball — but plans to push into to the primary care and neurology markets, Gross said. RightEye is looking to double its 25-person team in the next year, which will require a larger headquarters for the business, Gross said. He added that he has no intention to leave Montgomery County.

The capital would also be used to speed up research and development with the company’s machine learning techniques, enhance its eye-tracking technology and, ultimately, deliver more new products like its Parkinson’s disease test.

That test — developed by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth Universityand the Department of Veterans Affairs, funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation and acquired by RightEye in 2016 — measures a person’s ability to follow moving images on a screen. And because research shows a link between Parkinson’s disease and ocular tremors, or the lack of ability to fixate on targets, the test could be used both to diagnose the disease and, potentially, predict it before other symptoms manifest. To that extent, patients with early-stage cases could “begin certain treatments that may exist now, or may not exist for a few years, that can help stave off the symptoms of the disease,” Gross said.

The company will soon begin working with the FDA to secure approval to commercialize the test, which could come by the fourth quarter of 2021. It would follow RightEye’s first FDA green light in October 2018 for its device that detects neurological impairments or advantages in patients, such as reading issues in children or vision skills in athletes.

The FDA’s breakthrough device program helps facilitate the development and commercialization of new technologies. In the case of Parkinson’s, there’s no single test that confirms a diagnosis. The market represents a large opportunity for RightEye, given that Parkinson’s accounts for about $52 billion in health care costs each year, according to the Michael J. Fox Foundation. 

And there are potential applications beyond Parkinson’s, including other neurological conditions associated with eye movement behavior abnormalities such as concussion, Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.

RightEye is also expanding its work in the baseball space, fueled partially by the momentum the Washington Nationals’ World Series win has created, Gross said. RightEye counts the Nats among its clients, and that number has now grown to include about a third of the league’s teams. “We’ve really expanded that, and we’re looking to continue that,” he said.

From the professional level, “we’ll be able to impact more people as we go downstream in the youth sports market,” Gross said. He hopes to grow the firm's work with USA Baseball, the entity that governs amateur baseball, in 2020, along with other sports including softball, soccer, tennis, football and lacrosse. 

Now with 800 users across the U.S. and abroad, RightEye is experiencing 100% year-over-year revenue growth from 2018 to 2019, and projecting another year of near-100% growth in 2020, Gross said, declining to disclose specifics. The company last publicly reported revenue at $5 million in 2016.

https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2019/12/03/righteye-s-parkinson-s-test-just-took-a-big-step.html