A company providing medical screening services to life insurance companies has secured £1.4 million in a Series B funding round. Gemini Biomedical received £700,000 each from VCT manager SPARK Ventures and existing backer Alliance Fund Managers.

A company providing medical screening services to life insurance companies has secured £1.4 million in a Series B funding round. Gemini Biomedical received £700,000 each from VCT manager SPARK Ventures and existing backer Alliance Fund Managers.

Alliance, which invested £250,000 in Gemini in 2006, contributed to this fundraising through its MSIF Liverpool Seed Fund.

Jonathan Gee, head of healthcare at SPARK, comments, ‘Healthcare screening is a market trend which is seeing unprecedented growth and we regard Gemini as being at the forefront of developments in the sector.’

According to SPARK, there are 4 million applicants for life insurance per year in the UK. Insurers spend more than £100 million obtaining medical evidence and underwriting approximately 30 per cent of these cases.

Gemini provides its services through a network of pharmacies that take non-invasive samples which are then analysed by the company’s in-house laboratory, with the results recorded by its proprietary software.