Jawbone Gets $40 million in Funding

These next couple of posts are going to be a little dated, but I want to make sure I’m getting all of the various large funding happenings in healthcare IT and I only have so many hours in a day to post these things. Plus, hopefully I’ll add a little insight into what’s happening.

As reported by Lauren Goode on AllThings D, Jawbone received $40 million in funding from Deutsche Telekom, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Yuri Milner and investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Those are some really big name investors that are dipping into the healthcare space. A really great sign for those considering whether health IT is a place worth investing in right now.

What’s interesting is that Jawbone was still able to close this round of funding even after the huge issues they’ve had with their UP fitness wristband. My favorite write up of the Jawbone UP issues was from Michael Arrington. Basically, the company issued a full refund to anyone and they stopped selling the Jawbone UP. Even with all of that they still get $40 million in funding.

The other oddity I’m not sure about is the CEO Hosain Rahman talking about more healthcare products coming out and also some in the audio market. $40 million can do a lot of interesting things. Whether they become profitable and a wise investment is another story. Regardless of their profitability, I’ll be interested to see what other healthcare products they come out with and what they learned from the issues they experienced with the Jawbone UP.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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