A Consumer Platform to Drive Better Rare Disease Prognoses for One and All; Our Investment in Citizen Health’s Series A

When you look at the healthcare landscape—especially for rare diseases—it’s easy to feel a sense of urgency and frustration. Over 30 million Americans live with a rare disease, navigating a maze of specialists, endless paperwork, and a constant search for answers. Shockingly and sadly, around 95% of these conditions have no approved treatments. 

That’s the world Citizen Health set out to change. 

Today, Headline joins a $30 million Series A round alongside 8VC and prior investors Transformation Capital, Wavemaker 360, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)—all of whom bring deep expertise and networks in healthcare and technology.

At its core, Citizen Health is building a beautiful consumer platform that brings together every piece of a patient’s health journey—clinical data, genetic information, imaging, patient-reported outcomes, and claims. They’re then using AI to make sense of all this data, turning a pile of disconnected records into a clear, actionable story for each patient. For families, this means having a digital interface where they can actually find and use their medical information, get matched to clinical trials, make sense of medications and treatments, and connect with others who understand what they’re going through. 

For healthy consumers, this interface may not sound very critical but for rare disease patients and their families, these records are typically inaccessible or scattered across numerous portals, screenshots, and printouts and can be the difference of understanding whether they qualify for a new treatment or will have an adverse reaction to a drug. On Citizen, all records can be transferred to a healthcare provider with the click of a button.

But the impact goes way beyond individual patients. By partnering with patient advocacy groups (PAGs), Citizen Health is also solving a massive data fragmentation problem. There are about 1,200 PAGs in the U.S., each with its own registry and approach, which unintentionally keeps valuable data siloed. Citizen Health’s platform acts as a universal connector, aggregating data across all these groups, making it far more useful—not just for patients, but for the researchers and companies racing to develop new therapies.

Citizen Health was spun out of Invitae, bringing a powerhouse team with deep roots in both technology and patient advocacy. CEO Farid Vij, who was previously COO at Ciitizen (acquired by Invitae for $325M), and Chief Business Officer Nasha Fitter, a widely respected rare disease advocate, helped Citizen Health to build early trust with patient advocacy groups and families. From a business perspective, Citizen’s approach is already paying off. Since its seed round, Citizen Health has brought on dozens of PAGs and thousands of patients. Nearly half of their customers have expanded their business with Citizen Health, either by adding new disease cohorts or new use cases. Big names like AstraZeneca, UCB, and Ionis are early customers.

In addition to the impact on patient lives, we are very excited about the flywheel that Citizen Health is starting to see. Historically, biotech and pharma companies have struggled to develop treatments for rare diseases because of the lack of available patient data. As more PAGs and patients join the platform, their data becomes richer and more valuable.  This attracts more enterprise customers and drives more revenue, enabling Citizen Health to invest further in their technology and outreach. This, in turn, draws in even more PAGs and patients, creating a virtuous cycle of growth and impact. 

Citizen Health’s growth has been organic, driven predominantly through word-of-mouth due to Nasha’s advocacy for FOXG1 and credibility in the rare disease space. As AI continues to drive down the data structuring costs, their B2B2C model keeps customer acquisition costs low. 

Unique in healthcare, the consensus among patients, advocacy leaders, and pharma clients was glowing and consistent during our diligence process. PAG leaders raved about how Citizen finally gave their communities a way to organize and use their health data. Pharma clients highlighted the unique value of Citizen’s data across their efforts in new drug development, trials, and even patient recruitment. And everyone—from customers to competitors—spoke highly of Farid, Nasha, and the entire Citizen Health team.

Through their own experiences, Citizen deeply understood that rare disease patients never have beautiful products built for them – constantly told that the market opportunity isn’t great enough for great innovation. We admire that the team sees patients as consumers, who deserve intuitive and modern interfaces to navigate a notoriously complex system. We hope that in the future, when anyone is sick, the first question their doctor asks is, “Are you on Citizen?”

Citizen Health is the perfect combination of the right team + right technology + right approach + right time, colliding to solve one of healthcare’s most challenging problems. Citizen Health isn’t just building a business, but creating a platform that could redefine how we think about managing rare diseases–and beyond.

For more information, visit citizen.health.