Novellia Raises $18M in Series A FundingNovellia Raises $18M Series A to Expand Patient-Controlled Health Data Infrastructure

Novellia, a New York-based health data infrastructure company, has raised $18M in Series A funding led by Spark Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Acrew Capital, Bling Capital, and TMV, bringing total funding to $28M. The company is building a platform that allows patients to aggregate and control their medical records while enabling pharmaceutical companies to access patient-consented, anonymized datasets for research. Founded by Shashi Shankar (Co-Founder & CEO), Elliot Katz (Co-Founder & CTO), and Abe Abraham, MD, MBA (Co-Founder & CMO), Novellia is positioning itself at the intersection of healthcare infrastructure, patient data ownership, and real-world evidence generation. The funding arrives alongside the launch of the company's mobile application, extending access to a platform that can unify up to 20 years of medical records across more than 50,000 healthcare providers.

Why does this matter? Because healthcare has spent decades accumulating data while making it painfully difficult to move, access, and understand. Novellia is betting that the future of healthcare research starts with patient-controlled information rather than institutional ownership. More importantly, this funding reflects a broader shift unfolding across healthcare, AI, and life sciences: the value is moving from simply possessing data to earning permission to use it.

What Happened

Healthcare produces an astonishing amount of information. Hospitals create it. Clinics store it. Laboratories add to it. Patients often spend years trying to find it. That disconnect became the foundation of Novellia.

The company's origin traces back to a deeply personal experience for Shashi Shankar. While helping his grandfather navigate cancer treatment, medical records remained scattered across providers and systems. What should have been a straightforward process felt more like a scavenger hunt designed by bureaucracy. Years later, after spending nearly a decade at Genentech and Roche working across medical affairs, real-world data analysis, health economics, and commercial functions, Shashi Shankar encountered the same problem from a different angle. Researchers couldn't access complete patient histories. Pharmaceutical companies struggled with fragmented datasets. Valuable clinical insights remained buried across disconnected systems. Novellia emerged from that gap.

Today, Novellia allows patients to consolidate up to 20 years of medical records in under 30 seconds while connecting to more than 50,000 healthcare providers and accessing over 92% of U.S. health records. Co-Founder and CTO Elliot Katz built the technical foundation required to make that possible, while Angeline Chen, Director of Product, has helped shape the user experience as the platform scales. The platform utilizes healthcare interoperability standards including SMART on FHIR to connect disparate healthcare systems and simplify patient access to records.

Why This Matters

Most healthcare data businesses start with institutions. Novellia starts with patients. That distinction may sound subtle. It isn't.

Traditional healthcare data ecosystems often rely on records purchased, licensed, aggregated, or exchanged through layers of intermediaries. Novellia's model revolves around patient permission. Patients access their records for free and can choose whether their anonymized information contributes to medical research. The result is a different value proposition. Instead of treating consent as a compliance requirement, Novellia treats it as the foundation of the business model.

That approach becomes increasingly important as regulators, healthcare providers, patients, and researchers continue debating ownership, privacy, and transparency across health data ecosystems. Trust is rapidly becoming a strategic asset. Novellia appears determined to build around it.

Market Context

The healthcare industry has no shortage of data. What it lacks is continuity. Electronic health records promised interoperability. Patients got portals. Providers got software. Researchers got fragmented information spread across thousands of systems. The outcome resembles a library where every book is stored in a different building.

Novellia operates at the intersection of several rapidly growing markets, including real-world data (RWD), real-world evidence (RWE), healthcare AI, patient data infrastructure, and biopharma research platforms. RWD refers to healthcare information generated outside traditional clinical trials, while RWE refers to the clinical insights derived from analyzing that information.

The passage of the 21st Century Cures Act accelerated patient access rights to healthcare records and helped establish the regulatory foundation for companies focused on patient-controlled health information. The broader real-world evidence market is projected to exceed $10B by the end of the decade, creating significant opportunities for platforms capable of connecting fragmented healthcare information with researchers seeking richer datasets.

Competitive Landscape

The healthcare data market is crowded with vendors selling access, analytics, interoperability, and research insights. Novellia's differentiation centers on patient participation.

The company describes itself as a real-world data platform built on information patients choose to contribute. That creates a direct relationship between the data source and the research ecosystem. Investors appear to see meaningful potential in that approach.

Spark Capital led the round through Alex Finkelstein, joined by existing investors including Khosla Ventures, Acrew Capital, Bling Capital, and TMV. These firms have historically backed companies reshaping large, complex industries where infrastructure problems create outsized opportunities. Healthcare certainly qualifies. Few markets contain more friction, more stakeholders, or more information trapped behind operational walls.

What This Signals

The most important takeaway from Novellia's Series A is not the funding amount. It's what investors are funding.

This round reflects growing confidence that patient-controlled infrastructure may become a critical layer of future healthcare systems. For years, healthcare innovation focused on generating data. The next phase appears increasingly focused on organizing it, contextualizing it, and making it usable. That shift has implications for pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, researchers, regulators, and patients alike. Data remains valuable. Accessible data becomes actionable. Patient-consented data becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

The Bigger Industry Shift

A broader trend is unfolding across technology markets. Ownership is becoming less important than access. Storage is becoming less important than usability. Collection is becoming less important than permission.

Novellia sits directly inside that transition. The company's mobile app launch, expanding biopharma relationships, and new capital position it to pursue a market opportunity that extends well beyond electronic health records. The larger opportunity involves becoming a connective layer between patients, healthcare systems, and medical research.

Healthcare doesn't need another database. Healthcare needs context. Investors just placed an $18M bet that Novellia can help provide it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Novellia?

Novellia is a New York-based health data infrastructure company that helps patients aggregate medical records and contribute anonymized data for medical research.

How much funding did Novellia raise?

Novellia raised $18M in Series A funding, bringing total funding to $28M.

Who led Novellia's Series A funding round?

Spark Capital led the round, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Acrew Capital, Bling Capital, and TMV.

Who founded Novellia?

Novellia was founded by Shashi Shankar, Elliot Katz, and Abe Abraham, MD, MBA.

What does Novellia's platform do?

Novellia enables patients to consolidate medical records from more than 50,000 healthcare providers into a unified view they control.

What is real-world data (RWD)?

Real-world data is healthcare information collected outside traditional clinical trials, including patient records, treatment outcomes, diagnostic information, and care histories.

What is real-world evidence (RWE)?

Real-world evidence refers to clinical insights generated from analyzing real-world data to better understand treatments, outcomes, and patient populations.

Why are investors interested in patient-controlled healthcare data?

Patient-controlled healthcare data can improve transparency, consent management, data quality, and research participation while addressing long-standing interoperability challenges within healthcare systems.