Best Buy on Tuesday said it plans to acquire Current Health, a technology startup that develops tools for at-home healthcare.
The acquisition supports the consumer electronics retailer’s ongoing push into the at-home healthcare market.
“The future of consumer technology is directly connected to the future of healthcare,” said Deborah Di Sanzo, president of Best Buy Health, in a news release. “By combining Current Health’s remote care management platform with our existing health products and services, we can create a holistic care ecosystem.”
Current Health, a U.K.-based startup founded in 2015, sells a platform with remote patient-monitoring, telehealth and patient engagement tools to healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations for remote care, hospital-at-home and decentralized clinical trials programs. The platform lets patients report data and incorporates data from wearable devices.
Current Health—which counts health systems like Mayo Clinic and Geisinger among its customers, according to its website—has raised $91.9 million in funding to date. That includes a $43 million Series B funding round it announced in April, which included investments from Peoria, Illinois-based OSF HealthCare and venture-capital firm LRVHealth.
Mobile health app companies, including Current Health, have raised a collective $4.1 billion in venture capital from investors so far this year, according to data from Mercom Capital Group, a market research firm. That’s nearly one-fifth of the total $23 billion in venture capital raised by the digital health sector as a whole in the first three quarters of 2021.
Best Buy previously has acquired GreatCall and Critical Signal Technologies, citing older adults’ preference to age at home. That interest in receiving healthcare services at home has grown for patients across ages during the past two years, as healthcare providers sought to keep patients at home and out of the hospital in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Richfield, Minnesota-based Best Buy said it expects to close the Current Health acquisition by the end of its fiscal 2022, which takes place in early calendar 2022. The company did not disclose financial details of the transaction, but in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said it plans to finance the acquisition with cash.
Best Buy in August posted $11.8 billion in revenue for the second quarter of its fiscal year, which ended in July, up 19.6% year-over-year, and $797 million in operating income, up 40.3%.
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