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The Internet of Things is booming in the healthcare sector. A typical hospital has hundreds of connected devices, from implants, wearables, monitors, workflow and imaging to patient information systems. But while these tools are helping healthcare providers automate workflows and reduce the risk of error, common security vulnerabilities found in these tools are putting patients at risk.
The FBI warned in September that more than half of connected medical devices in hospitals have known critical security vulnerabilities and that these flaws are leading to more attacks on the healthcare industry.
This increase in exposure has led to increased control. In the wake of Covid-fueled delays, the US Food and Drug Administration this year outlined recommendations related to the design and maintenance of medical devices in its Premarket Cybersecurity Guidance and Postmarket Cybersecurity Guidance.
“That’s when we started to see device manufacturers really start to make changes,” said Mike Kijewski, founder and CEO of San Diego-based medical device cybersecurity software developer MedCrypt. Prior to founding MedCrypt, Kijewski was the founder of Gamma Basics, a software startup focused on radiation oncology.
MedCrypt is a Y Combinator graduate that provides software for medical devices, from insulin pumps and heart rate monitors to AI-based radiology equipment and autonomous robots, where the FDA may be concerned about cybersecurity. These devices all suffer from three common problems, Kijewski told TechCrunch: outdated software, user authentication and lack of good encryption.
“Historically, healthcare companies have thought that if my device is working in a hospital, we can trust the people in the hospital, and if a bad guy walks into the hospital, that’s not our problem,” Kijewski said. “So they use the same username and password for every device they export.”
MedCrypt announced this week that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Intuitive Ventures and Johnson & Johnson Innovation to help device manufacturers meet these FDA requirements to bring critical devices to market faster. The investment comes three years after it raised $5.3 million in Series A funding, a gap created by the uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We had a 12- to 18-month gap in market growth as we anticipated, but now we’re back on track,” Kijewski said.
MedCrypt works with most of the top medical device manufacturers and says the latest investment — also backed by Episode 32, Eniac Ventures, Anzu Partners and Dolby Family Ventures — will help it get its hands on both the product and the team. More.
However, MedCrypt’s ultimate goal is far greater. “I think there’s an opportunity to be a very large publicly traded healthcare-focused cybersecurity company,” Kijewski said. “I want to be the one who built the company.”
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