Drugs Search Engine Diagnosia Raises €1M To Take Its Wares To Europe

To readers looking for an alternative to Silk Road, I’m afraid that Diagnosia is a drugs-related startup of a very different kind. Competing with the likes of Rxlist, Drugs.com and Epocrates, the Austrian company launched in 2011 as a European drugs info search engine targeting both consumers and medical professionals, but has since added a number of subscription-based apps aimed at physicians who need speedy and up-to-date access to drug information.

Today Diagnosia, which is co-founded by former sometimes TechCrunch Europe contributor Lukas Zinnagl, has announced that it’s raised a further €1 million to expand its wares to other European countries outside of its native Austria. Participating in the round is Austrian research institute FFG, along with angel investors Christoph Prinz, Michael Altrichter, Johann Jauk, Martin Dall, and Christoph Gelbmann.

The new funding adds to a previous investment led by Johann Hansmann, a former pharma entrepreneur and now active angel investor whose previous investments include language learning tool busuu, and fitness app Runtastic, which was recently majority acquired by German media company Axel Springer.

Alongside its web-based drugs info search engine, which we previously likened to indexing the patient information leaflets that come with prescription medication, Diagnosia’s two primary apps for physicians are Diagnosia Index, and Diagnosia Check.

The former is described as a “medical drug information system” that consists of both iOS and Android apps, as well as a PC-friendly web version. It enables medical professionals to get quick access to up-to-date drug information.

Building on this database of drug info, iOS-only Diagnosia Check tackles the problem of checking multiple drug-to-drug and drug-to-food interactions in order to ensure that prescribed drugs are safe for the patient to use. The app contains 12,000 sets of interactions with detailed information including consequences, recommendations and references to help physicians make the right decisions.

Zinnagl tells me Diagnosia will roll out its apps in the Netherlands and other German speaking countries like Switzerland “within the next 6 months”. The Vienna-based company, which currently has a head-count of 20, is also poised to launch other drugs info-related products under the Diagosia brand.

“Since Diagnosia.com also runs the biggest drug search engine in Europe, it understands both the needs of medical professionals as well as its patient audience, which will lead to further innovations and products along the way,” says Zinnagl.