Westport’s LifeMed Gets $9.5 Million Infusion
By Soule, Alexander
A Westport company that provides information on diabetes has received $9.5 million in financing.
LifeMed Media Inc., which does business as dLife, received the infusion from New York, City investors Cross Atlantic Partners and Milestone Venture Partners, and Battery Ventures of Waltham, Mass.
Since the start of the third quarter, the only Fairfield County startup to receive more funding was Biodel Inc., a Danbury drug development company which disclosed $21 million in funding.
LifeMed bills itself as the only multimedia company providing information on diabetes, with its offerings including a Web site, a radio feature, a newsletter, pod casts and a television program.
Founder Howard Steinberg previously ran Source Marketing of Westport and before that worked for PepsiCola Co. In two years, he has raised $18 million to support dLife’s expansion. The company employs about 30 people.
Steinberg has grown dLife even as diabetes sites continue to rapidly proliferate and compete for an audience, Sites include for- , profit companies like LifeMed and WebMD, nonprofit and government organizations, and drug companies like Novo Nordisk AS of Princeton, N.J., a dLife sponsor which recently launched DiabetesXChange.org.
In April, dLife’s page-view count spiked to 81 million views daily, according to Alexa Internet, an Amazon.com. Inc. subsidiary which tracks Web page activity, briefly exceeding the visitors to the home page of the American Diabetes Association (ADA). Since then, dLife page views have dropped to less than 2 million views daily, while ADA regularly registers between two million and four million page views daily.
WebMD, by contrast, regularly exceeds 50 million page views daily for its Web sites that tackle a range of health issues.
Steinberg’s company beat WebMD to the television studio, however. Whereas WebMD began running television programming over the Internet one year ago, dLife has had a half-hour show on diabetes topics on CNBC since February 2005.
The company’s videos, which have featured guest appearances by NBA player Adam Morrison and pro baseball pitcher Jason Johnson, are also distributed on the Healthy Living Network, beamed into 2,000 hospital waiting rooms; and over’ Internet channels such as Brightcove.com, a Web site that streams television programming.
DLife also airs A radio program to 440 stations in 165 U.S. markets, as well as on satellite radio. The company e-mails a newsletter each Friday to 60,000 subscribers. It runs a direct-mail promotional program twice a year to 2.5 million “diabetic” households, with response rates ranging from 0.5 percent to 3.3 percent.
Steinberg said he intends to broaden LifeMed’s focus to other widespread health problems – he has publicly mentioned allergies, heart ailments and obesity – but said the company has no immediate plans to use the new funding for that purpose.
Copyright Westfair Communications Nov 27, 2006
(c) 2006 Fairfield County Business Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.