Evidation

Somewhere in California this morning, a woman with a sore knee opened an app, answered four questions about her sleep, and made $2.40. She did not know it, but a pharmaceutical researcher 2,000 miles away just got slightly closer to understanding how a new drug performs in real homes, in real kitchens, on real Tuesdays.

That, in one anecdote, is Evidation in 2026.

It is a health-data company headquartered in San Mateo with around 83 employees, more than four million app members, and a thesis that sounds simple until you try to pull it off: most of what we know about medicine comes from people who showed up at clinics on a specific day, in a specific gown. Almost everything else - the 23 hours a day patients spend not being patients - has historically been invisible. Evidation built its business around making the invisible visible, while paying people for the trouble.

The company collects real-world health data - steps, heart rate, sleep, surveys, occasional medical histories - through its consumer app, Achievement, and routes it (with consent, in aggregate, dressed up properly) into clinical research for life sciences partners and into personalized programs for the members themselves. It is, in spirit, a two-sided marketplace. The currency on one side is dollars. The currency on the other side is rigor.

Medicine has a sampling problem.

Traditional clinical trials are good at one thing: telling you what happens to a small, screened, geographically clustered group of people during a defined window. That is useful. It is not, however, the whole picture. Real patients drift between adherence and forgetfulness. They live at altitudes the trial never tested. They take their pills with coffee, or grapefruit juice, or nothing at all. They miss appointments because the bus was late.

None of that shows up in a P-value.

The shorthand inside the industry is real-world evidence - data drawn from how people actually live, not how they perform at week six of a controlled study. Regulators have warmed to it. Pharma needs it. Payers can't price products without it. And yet, until recently, real-world evidence often meant trawling messy electronic health records or buying claims data from someone who once bought it from someone else.

Evidation's founders looked at the same problem and made a slightly different bet. What if you could ask the actual humans? What if they had an incentive to say yes? What if the source of the data - the wearable, the phone, the survey - was already in their pocket?

Christine Lemke and Deborah Kilpatrick made a deal with consumers.

Christine Lemke co-founded Evidation in 2012. Deborah Kilpatrick, a cardiovascular medical-device veteran, joined in 2014 through GE Ventures and the two ended up running the company - first with Kilpatrick as CEO and Lemke as President, then under a Co-CEO model as the business grew. In March 2025 the baton passed: Leslie Oley Wilberforce became CEO, Lemke moved to the Board, Kilpatrick continues as Executive Chair.

Their bet had three parts, and only the first part was obvious.

One: build a consumer product that people would actually open. Two: pay them - not in promises or wellness points, but in real money - for healthy behavior and for participation in research. Three, the unobvious part: do all of that with enough scientific rigor that pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and the American College of Cardiology would treat your data as a primary source, not a curiosity.

It is the sort of plan that sounds easy at a whiteboard and turns out to involve, in practice, fourteen years of regulatory conversations, infrastructure builds, and patient-trust work. The fact that Evidation is still here, with $255M raised and a growing enterprise business, suggests the whiteboard was on to something.

Achievement is the visible part. The platform is everything else.

If you've used Evidation, you've probably used Achievement - the company's iOS and Android app. It connects to Fitbit, Apple Health, Google Fit, Samsung Health, Oura and a long tail of other devices. You log activity, take occasional surveys, sometimes join a study. Points accumulate. Every 10,000 of them converts to $10 via PayPal. It is, by design, slightly boring in the way that compound interest is slightly boring.

Underneath that boredom is a platform that does several less-boring things at once:

The trick that ties it all together is consent. Members opt into studies. They can leave. The data flows in patterns that they - in theory and in practice - can audit. For a company in the business of "your health information," that is not a small detail.

Fourteen years, in short.

Customers, partners, and a quiet kind of validation.

Evidation does not list every customer. It does not have to. Its partners include large life-sciences companies, the American College of Cardiology, BARDA, Apple, and the Singapore government. The investor list - Kaiser Permanente, OMERS, B Capital, McKesson Ventures, Sanofi Ventures, Section 32, SV Health - reads like a who's-who of strategics that need the data on the other end of the platform.

That mix matters. Pharma money tends to follow pharma evidence. Payer money follows population-level signal. Government money follows public-health utility. The fact that all three keep showing up at the same Series E is, in venture terms, a tell.

Members vote with their attention. Four million people across all 50 states, in roughly 9 of every 10 US ZIP codes, have opted in. That kind of geographic spread is unusual; most digital-health cohorts skew coastal, urban, and well-insured. Evidation's reach is closer to the actual demographic shape of the country, which is precisely why life-sciences partners care.

Participation, not extraction.

Evidation describes its mission in plain language: enable and empower everyone to participate in better health outcomes. The word that does the work in that sentence is participate. Not "monitor." Not "track." Not "be tracked by." Participate.

This is the part where most health-data companies have, historically, slipped. The model that took root in adjacent industries - collect now, monetize later, apologize never - does not survive contact with healthcare. Patients notice. Regulators notice. Reporters notice. Evidation's bet is that a participatory model, where members consent to specific uses and get paid for specific contributions, is not just more ethical but also more durable. People stay. Data quality stays high. Studies get repeated.

Whether that bet holds at 40 million members instead of 4 million is the next test.

Drug development is moving outside the building.

Three things are converging. Wearables are getting medical-grade. Regulators are accepting digital endpoints. AI is making it cheaper to find signal in noisy, continuous data. The result is a slow shift in how new therapies get developed, monitored, and adjusted - from inside the clinic to alongside daily life.

Companies that own consented cohorts at scale, with the infrastructure to run rigorous virtual studies, become very useful in that world. Evidation is not the only one chasing it, but it has a head start measured in years and a cohort measured in millions. Both are hard to replicate quickly.

Back to that woman with the sore knee. Tomorrow morning she will open the app again. She will answer four more questions. She will earn another small payment. Somewhere, a clinical team will adjust a hypothesis - or confirm one, which is the harder, quieter kind of progress - because she did. That is the loop Evidation has been building since 2012. It is not flashy. It is not finished. It is, increasingly, working.

Pass it on.

Official channels and further reading.