Novellia wants to do two things at once, and the tension between them defines the entire company.
On one hand, the New York startup offers consumers something genuinely useful: a free iPhone app that stitches together scattered medical records from hospitals, labs, and clinics across the country into a single digital file. On the other, it's selling something those same users might not fully appreciate they're providing—anonymized health data that pharmaceutical giants are willing to pay seven figures to access.
That duality hasn't deterred investors. Novellia announced an $18 million Series A round on June 2, 2026, led by Spark Capital and joined by Khosla Ventures, Acrew Capital, Bling Capital, and TMV. The funding brings the company's total raised to $28 million since CEO Shashi Shankar founded it in 2023, and it arrives at a moment when the market for real-world health data has never been hotter—or more scrutinized.
The business model is straightforward, if morally complex in ways the company insists it has addressed. Users download the app, link it to their provider portals using SMART on FHIR interoperability standards (the kind mandated by federal regulation under the 21st Century Cures Act), and watch as their records accumulate in one place. Then comes the ask: Would you like to contribute your de-identified information to medical research?
Those who say yes become part of datasets Novellia licenses to life sciences companies under multi-year contracts. The startup says it's already locked in several such agreements—some in the seven figures—with multiple top-10 pharmaceutical companies and early-stage diagnostics firms. Novellia claims the broader market for real-world evidence is $50 billion annually, fragmented across research outfits hungry for longitudinal patient data that isn't trapped behind hospital firewalls.
When the Product Is Also the User
There's an obvious comparison here to the consumer internet's well-worn playbook: offer a service for free, monetize the data. Novellia's executives bristle at the analogy. Unlike social platforms that bury consent in 47-page terms of service, the company says it puts the choice front and center. Patients must actively opt in. Their information is anonymized and aggregated before it ever reaches a pharma company's servers. And unlike, say, selling browsing habits to advertisers, the end use here is ostensibly noble—accelerating drug development, improving diagnostics, understanding how treatments perform outside clinical trials.
Still, skepticism persists in privacy circles. How truly anonymous is "anonymized" health data when combined with other datasets? What happens if a breach occurs, or if a future acquirer has fewer scruples? These questions have dogged every health-data venture that's tried to walk this line, and Novellia likely won't be the last to face them.
For now, though, the company is moving fast. Shankar told MobiHealthNews that the fresh capital will fund three priorities: refining the consumer app, building out AI infrastructure to deliver faster real-world evidence to biopharma clients, and expanding into new therapeutic areas—GLP-1 drugs for weight and diabetes management, cardiometabolic conditions, rare diseases, and rare cancers.
That AI layer is doing heavy lifting. Novellia's natural language processing pipeline combs through unstructured clinical text—physician notes, lab narratives, diagnostic write-ups—and extracts structured insights that can be analyzed at scale. It's the kind of capability that turns messy, siloed health records into the longitudinal datasets pharma companies crave for research and development. And it's increasingly critical, according to Alex Finkelstein, a general partner at Spark Capital who joined Novellia's board with this round.
"Real-world evidence is becoming increasingly critical in drug development," Finkelstein said in a statement announcing the funding. That's not just investor talk. The FDA has been pushing drugmakers to incorporate real-world data into submissions, and payers want proof that expensive therapies work outside the controlled conditions of a trial. Novellia is betting it can be the infrastructure layer for that shift.
Early Traction, Modest Momentum
The company launched its iOS app in July 2025, so it's been live for less than a year. As of June 2026, the app carries a 4.6-out-of-5 rating on the Apple App Store, though that's based on just 20 reviews—a sample size too small to draw sweeping conclusions about user satisfaction. The platform connects to major health systems including Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Sutter Health, and Quest Diagnostics, benefiting from interoperability mandates that have forced providers to open up their data pipes.
On the enterprise side, Novellia has been more aggressive. The company won a 2026 Fierce Outsourcing Award for Innovation in Drug Development and a MedTech Breakthrough Award for Best Healthcare Data Repository Solution—the kind of industry accolades that look good in pitch decks and help close contracts. More substantively, it's published research collaborations with academic institutions and pharma partners. Project EVEREST, a breast cancer quality-improvement initiative launched in May 2025, is backed by Daiichi Sankyo, Genentech, and AstraZeneca, using Novellia's platform to analyze treatment adherence in real-world settings.
Those partnerships matter. They signal that major players are willing to trust Novellia with sensitive data workflows, and they generate case studies the startup can use to land the next deal.
Scaling Both Sides of the Marketplace
Novellia now faces the classic two-sided marketplace challenge: it needs enough consumers to generate meaningful datasets, and enough pharma contracts to fund the engineering required to keep those consumers happy. The company's LinkedIn profile listed between 11 and 50 employees as of May 2026, a range that suggests it's still relatively lean. Expect that to change. Shankar will almost certainly use a chunk of the Series A to hire—more engineers to refine the AI pipeline, more salespeople to chase pharma contracts, perhaps a few policy and privacy experts to navigate the inevitable regulatory scrutiny.
The stakes are high, and the model unproven at scale. But if Novellia can thread the needle—building a consumer app people genuinely want while monetizing their data in ways that feel transparent and beneficial—it could carve out a lucrative niche in the sprawling, messy intersection of healthcare and technology.
Whether patients will ultimately feel comfortable with that bargain remains to be seen.
