Digital chronic disease management company Livongo has raised $105 million in new Series E funding, mostly from existing investors. The company also announced a partnership with nonprofit health insurance company Cambia Health Solutions. General Catalyst and Swedish investment company Kinnevik led the round, with additional participation from existing investors DFJ, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers , Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, Microsoft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Zaffre Investments, and 7wire Ventures. Echo Health Ventures, an investment group cofounded by Cambia and Mosaic Health Solutions, also contributed.

"This is a great vote of confidence for the company in two respects," CEO Glen Tullman told MobiHealthNews. "One, this is an internal round and it’s a big step up from where we are. We’ve topped about two and a half times the last funding in just over a year ... [and] it’s all internal. Internal folks know everything that’s going on. They’ve been at the board meetings, they know what’s going on, and they were very excited to preemptively put more money into the company given the success the company is enjoying. ... Second, we now have more than 350 different large self-insured employers, payers, provider systems, and the two largest PBMs. So once again the market is validating the company and the business plan."

Livongo Health’s current offering, called Livongo for Diabetes, consists of connected devices, a smart cloud, and a virtual care team. The Livongo Meter serves as both a connected glucometer and a pedometer and will allow easy sharing of the data. It’s a standalone device with a color touchscreen that is cellular-connected. The offering also supplies unlimited test strips at no extra charge. A second recently launched offering focuses on hypertension.

Cambia has six health plans in four states in the Pacific Northwest, covering 2 million members. The group is known for innovative thinking and strategic investing.

Livongo will work with Cambia to roll out its existing diabetes management and hypertension management offerings to Cambia members, and to work with Cambia to create coaching and monitoring platforms for additional chronic conditions.

"If you have Type 2 diabetes, 70 percent of those people also have hypertension," Tullman said. "Most health systems would look at that and say ‘Ok, we’ll give them a separate coach for hypertension, a separate product for hypertension and diabetes.' And the people are saying ‘I don’t have time to deal with one coach, let alone three different health coaches.' So looking at them as a whole person rather than a bunch of diseases is key. So what I found in Mark Ganz, the CEO of Cambia, was somebody who really got it, somebody who really understood the way we’ve got to do this."

While Tullman says Livongo doesn't need the funding, it will help, he says, to support growth and scale as well as new investments in data science and, crucially, expanding the portfolio of diseases the company can address.

"Basically what we want is we want to be the one-stop shop for people who have a chronic condition," Tullman said. "What our customers are saying is ‘We love the innovation, we just can’t deal with five different companies coming in with five different solutions. This doesn’t work for us. And what we need is one company that does it all.’ So that’s what we’re doing."