Federal guidance restricting hospital websites’ use of third-party trackers along with the proliferation of direct-to-consumer health services is spawning a new crop of health tech startups promising to help beleaguered providers stay on the right side of the law.
Among them is San Francisco startup Freshpaint, which on Wednesday announced a $30 million Series B round to sell its privacy platform to providers, pharmacies, insurers. Freshpaint’s platform is designed to strip identifiable information about website visitors before the data is sent to advertising middlemen such as Meta or Google analytics. Freshpaint, which also monitors any third-party trackers active on a provider’s website, announced the new funding round exclusively to STAT.
Consumers are increasingly searching for health services on their phones or computers, but the “internet is the antithesis of privacy,” said Emily Melton, a co-founder and managing partner at venture capital firm Threshold, which led Freshpaint’s new funding round. “It’s going to require different privacy paradigms.” Other investors include SignalFire, Intel Capital, and Zero Prime.
