Social Network For Cancer Patients Raises $14M To Accelerate Growth

Belong.Life, the company behind the “Belong – Beating Cancer Together” mobile app, the world’s largest social network for cancer patients that enables easier access to health professionals and patients with similar conditions, announced the completion of a $14 million Series B funding round to accelerate growth.

The company was founded in New York in 2015 by entrepreneurs Eliran Malki, Irad Deutsch and Ohad Rubin, after each lost relatives to cancer. Together, they developed a free, AI-powered app through which patients can receive responses by professionals, converse with other patients, and use Belong’s clinical trial matching service.

Belong has ongoing partnerships with the American Cancer Society, Colorectal Cancer Canada (CCC), and GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer.

The funding round was led by IQVIA, a global provider of advanced analytics, technology solutions and contract research services to the life sciences industry.

Belong.Life said it will use the funding to advance and expand the network and the Belong Patient Engagement Platform (PEP), a new platform “designed to improve patient engagement, education, compliance, satisfaction, auto-care coordination and efficiency.”

“The end-to-end solution provides patients, payers, providers, and life science companies with hyper-personalized and configurable patient engagement tools, navigation and management services,” the company said in a statement.

“We at Belong are focused on building the most robust, hyper-personalized and configurable patient engagement and research platform,” said Malki, who serves as Belong.Life CEO.

“Starting with Belong – Beating Cancer Together, we quickly grew to become the world’s largest social network and patient navigator app for cancer, collaborating with leading and disruptive researchers and publications in the market. Now, in addition to increasing our global cancer reach, Belong will bring its capabilities and expertise to additional diseases and stakeholders, to achieve the vision we established at the very beginning.”

Tal Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Global Technology Solutions at IQVIA said, “Our investment in Belong is part of our strategy to identify and accelerate disruptive technologies that can improve healthcare. Through its unique patient engagement platform with machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, Belong can utilize and complement IQVIA’s solutions to transform patient engagement. We are thrilled to work with Belong.”