Lucienne Ide lived many different professional lives before entering the world of startups.
She started out in venture capital and then headed to Emory University for her dual MD/PhD in Molecular and Systems Pharmacology. Ide’s time as a physician and scientist made her realize a big pain point in the American healthcare system: It is nearly impossible to track everything about a patient once they leave the doctor’s office.
It was an issue she just couldn’t unsee, she told Hypepotamus. A doctor gets just a few minutes every year to be with a patient and is still expected to come up with a “data-driven, specific” plan to help that person improve his or her health.
“Problems really get under my skin. When I see some solution to that isn’t happening, that really frustrates me,” she said.
While being an entrepreneur wasn’t necessarily the goal, Ide realized that the only way to really get at the heart of the problem was to build the technology herself.
For the last twelve years, Ide has been building up Rimidi as a health IT platform for clinicians looking to monitor patients remotely. She initially focused on diabetes management, given the sheer amount of data available for those patients. But as remote patient monitoring devices and telehealth have grown in popularity, Rimidi has expanded its efforts into monitoring a variety of conditions – including Hypertension, Heart Failure, NAFLD and NASH, COPD and Asthma, Obesity, and Chronic Kidney Disease.
Finding “Patient” Investors
Healthcare tech is a notoriously hard industry to sell into and a difficult one for startups to gain a foothold in. Relationships with hospital systems can be difficult to manage for fast-moving technology teams. But Rimidi has navigated the world, growing its employee base to 30 and grabbing the attention of some impressive investors along the way.
From the beginning, Ide said that she knew it would be important to bring on “strategic” and “patient” investors who weren’t necessarily looking for a return at the same pace that traditional venture capitalists expect. It turns out, there were many healthcare giants who saw opportunities within what Rimidi was building.
When Eli Lilly made its investment into Rimidi, Ide said that the pharmaceutical giant was just starting its digital business unit. Cox Enterprises, another investor, was just starting its healthcare portfolio. In late 2022, the healthcare company Henry Schein backed the company and integrated its technology as a way to improve patient outcomes.
Twelve years into the journey, Ide said that Rimidi has hit its “product maturity phase,” so marketing expansion is top of mind in 2024.
