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Healthy.io, Israeli maker of smartphone urinalysis tech, buys its largest U.S. rival

Published Fri, Jun 26 20201:00 PM EDT

Key Points

Israel-based Healthy.io is buying up its chief Silicon Valley-based rival.
It's purchasing Inui Health, formerly known as Scanadu, for $9 million.
The acquisition negotiations started in January and continued as Healthy.io experienced major growth during the pandemic.

Healthy.io, an Israel-based company that provides at-home urinalysis, is purchasing Inui Health, its longtime Silicon Valley competitor.

The purchase price was around $9 million, and it's an all cash deal that is based on Inui Health meeting certain milestones, Healthy.io told CNBC. Inui Health's CEO Dr. Jaime Tenedorio will be joining the Healthy.io team and will continue to be based on the West Coast.

Inui Health, formerly known as Scanadu, received FDA clearance in 2018 for a smartphone-based at-home urine test. At that time, only three companies had received a green light from regulators, including another start-up, called Scanwell Health. All the companies — with some slight variations in their approach — send a a kit to the patients' home with an FDA-approved stick that can be dipped in a cup of urine. From there a smartphone camera scans the results, which are shared with the patients' medical provider.

Inui Health by that time had shuttered its best known product, called Scanadu Scout, which aimed to provide a home scanning product for myriad medical conditions. Scanadu raised more than $1 million in 2013 on Indiegogo to build out its Star Trek Tricorder-like scanner, which represented one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns of all time.

Healthy.io is backed by $90 million in financing from a combination of U.S. and Israeli investors, including Samsung's venture firm and Aleph. Meanwhile, Inui has pulled in more than $56 million from investors including Redmile and Tencent Holdings.

For Healthy.io the acquisition will help the company move more quickly into the U.S. market. The company, which was named to CNBC's 2020 Disruptor 50 list, uses its system to look for signs of early kidney disease and urinary tract infections. It also plans to move into pregnancy monitoring to detect possible complications.

"Ultimately, our board decided unanimously in favor of doubling down and finalizing the acquisition, as we see many of the core assets Inui developed as key to our short-term scale in the U.S.," said Healthy.io founder and CEO Yonatan Adiri.

Both companies are poised to do well in the midst of a pandemic as people are looking to avoid labs and doctors office wherever possible. Adiri said that the company's activity has tripled in Europe since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Adiri believes that Israel-based health-tech companies have an edge over their U.S. competitors.

"Our health-care system has been digital for 20 years," said Adiri, who previously worked as a technical advisor to former Israeli president Shimon Peres, in a recent interview. "That creates data and structured capabilities."