Technology

Swedish telehealth startup Kryhas closed a $66 million Series B funding round led byIndex Ventures,with participation from existing investorsAccel,Creandum, andProject A.

It raised a $22.8M Series A round just over a year ago, bringing its total raised since being founded back in 2014 to around $92M.

The new funding will be put towards market expansion, with the UK and French markets its initial targets. It also says it wants to deepen its penetration inexisting markets: Sweden, Norway and Spain, and to expandits medical offering to be able to offer more services via the remote consultations.

A spokesperson forKry also tells us itexploring different business models.

While the initial Kry offering requires patients to pay per video consultation this may not offer the best approach to scale the business in a market like the UK where healthcare is free at the point of use, as a result of the taxpayer-funded National Health Service.

&Our goal is to offer our service to as many patients as possible. We are currently exploring different models to deliver our care and are in close discussions with different stakeholders, both public and private,& a spokesperson told us.

&Just as the business models will vary across Europe so will the price,& he added.

While consultations are conducted remotely, via the appvideo platform — with Krypitch being tech-enabled convenience and increased accessibility to qualified healthcare professionals, i.e. thanks to the app-based delivery of the service — it specifies that doctors are always recruited locally in each market where it operates.

In terms of metrics, it says ithad around 430,000 user registrations to date, and that some 400,000 &patients meetings& have been conducted so far (to be clear thatnot unique users, as it says some have been repeat consultations; and some of the 430k registrations are people who have not yet used the service).

Across its first three European markets it also says the service grew by 740% last year, and it claims it now accounts for more than 3% of all primary care doctor visits in Sweden — where it has more than 300 clinicians working in the service.

In March this year it alsolaunched an online psychology service and says itnow the largest provider of CBT-treatments in Sweden.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Martin Mignot, partner at Index Ventures, said: &Kryoffers a unique opportunity to deliver a much improved healthcare to patients across Europe and reduce the overall costs associated with primary care.Kryhas already become a household name in Sweden where regulators have seen first-hand how it benefits patients and allowedKryto become an integral part of the public healthcare system. We are excited to be working with Johannes and his team to bringKryto the rest of Europe.&

As well as the app being the conduit for a video consultation between doctor and patient, patients must also describe in writing and input their symptoms into the app, uploading relevant pictures and responding tosymptom-specific questions.

During the video call with a Kry doctor, patients may also receive prescriptions for medication, advice, referral to a specialist, or lab or home tests with a follow-up appointment — with prescribed medication and home tests able to be delivered to the patienthomewithin two hours, according to the startup.

&We have users from all age groups. Our oldest patient just turned 100 years old. One big user group is families with young children but we see that usage is becoming more even over different age groups,& adds the spokesman.

There are now a number of other startups seeking to scale businesses in the video-call-a-doctor telehealth space — such as Push Doctor, in the UK, and Doctor On Demand in the US, to name two.

Another fallout from themassive Yahoo data breach that dates back to 2014: The UKdata watchdog has just issued a £250,000 (~$334k) penalty for violations of the Data Protection Act 1998.

Yahoo, which has since been acquired by Verizon and merged with AOL to form a joint entity called Oath (which is also the parent of TechCrunch), is arguably getting off pretty lightly here for a breach that impacted a whopping ~500M users.

Certainly given how large data protection fines can now scale under the European Union new privacy framework, GDPR, which also requires that most breaches be disclosed within 72 hours of discovery (rather than, ooooh, two years or so later in the Yahoo case… ).

The Information CommissionerOffice (ICO) focused its investigation on the more than 515,000 affected UK accounts which the London-based Yahoo UK Services Ltd had responsibility for as a data controller.

And it found a catalogue of failures — specifically findingthat Yahoo UK Services had: Failed to take appropriatetechnical and organisational measures to protect the data against exfiltration by unauthorised persons; had failed to take appropriate measures to ensure that its data processor — Yahoo! Inc — complied with the appropriate data protection standards; hadfailed to ensure appropriate monitoring was in place to protect the credentials of Yahoo! employees with access to Yahoo! customer data; and also that theinadequacies found had been in place for &a long period of time without being discovered or addressed&.

Commenting in a statement, the ICO deputy commissioner of operations, James Dipple-Johnstone, said: &People expect that organisations will keep their personal data safe from malicious intruders who seek to exploit it. The failings our investigation identified are not what we expect from a company that had ample opportunity to implement appropriate measures, and potentially stop UK citizens& data being compromised.&

According to the ICO personal data compromised in the breachincluded names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords, and encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.

It considered the breach to be a &serious contravention of Principle 7 of the Data Protection Act 1998& — which states that appropriate technical and organisational measures must be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data.

Happily for Oath, GDPR does not apply historically because the UKdomestic regime only allows for maximum penalties of £500k.

And given Verizon was able to knock $350M off the acquisition price of Yahoo on account of a pair of massive data breaches, well, itnot going to be too concerned with the regulatory sting here.

Reputation wise is perhaps another matter. Though, again, Yahoo had disclosed the breaches before the acquisition closed so any damage had already been publicly attached to Yahoo.

An Oath spokesman told us the company does not comment directly on regulatory actions — but pointed to several developments since Yahoo was acquired, including the doubling in size of the global security organization; the creation in March of a cybersecurity advisory board; and the relaunch in April of an integrated bug bounty program.

Also, as we reported last year, Yahoochief information security officer, Bob Lord — who was in charge at the time the breach was unearthed — lost out to AOLChris Nims in the merger process, with the latter taking up the security chiefchair of the new umbrella entity, Oath.

Security is certainly now being generally pushed up the C-suite agenda for all organizations handling EU data as a consequence of GDPR concentrating minds on much more sizable legal liabilities.

The regulationdata protection by design requirements also mean privacy considerations need to be baked into the data processing lifecycle, ergo policies and processes must be in place, alongside strong IT governance and security measures, to ensure compliance with the law — with the idea being to shrink the ability for attackers to intrude as happened so extensively in the Yahoo breaches.

&Under the GDPR and the new Data Protection Act 2018, individuals have stronger rights and more control and choice over their personal data. If organisations, especially well-resourced, experienced ones, do not properly safeguard their customers& personal data, they may find customers taking their business elsewhere,& addedDipple-Johnstone.

Earlier this year the ICO issued a larger fine for a 2015 hack of Carphone Warehouse which compromised data of more than 3M people, and also included historical payment card details for a subset of the affected users.

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has created a system that can see your body through walls, recreating your poses when you walk, sit, or simply stand still. It uses RF waves to sense where you are and then recreates your body as a simple stick figure. Itcalled RF-Pose.

From the release:

The researchers use a neural network to analyze radio signals that bounce off peoplebodies, and can then create a dynamic stick figure that walks, stops, sits and moves its limbs as the person performs those actions.

The team says that the system could be used to monitor diseases like Parkinsonand multiple sclerosis (MS), providing a better understanding of disease progression and allowing doctors to adjust medications accordingly. It could also help elderly people live more independently, while providing the added security of monitoring for falls, injuries and changes in activity patterns.

The team is primarily interested in using this system for healthcare, allowing for passive monitoring of a subject inside a room without cameras or other intrusions. &All data the team collected has subjects& consent and is anonymized and encrypted to protect user privacy,& wrote the researchers. &For future real-world applications, the team plans to implement a ‘consent mechanism& in which the person who installs the device is cued to do a specific set of movements in order for it to begin to monitor the environment.&

The researchers trained the neural network by showing a machine a video of a person walking next to the RF interference they made as they moved. They then overlaid stick figures on the movement and trained the network to do the same automatically. Because RF signals are ubiquitous, it was easier to use than other sensing technologies.

Interestingly the researchers never trained the system to see through walls but it was able to &generalize its knowledge to be able to handle through-wall movement.&

&If you think of the computer vision system as the teacher, this is a truly fascinating example of the student outperforming the teacher,& said researcher Antonio Torralba. There is no word if the system will be used for other commercial purposes.