Nightingale enters into a new strategic partnership in the US

Translation: Original comment published in Finnish on 06/28/2024 at 10:45 am EEST

 The partnership covers a service contract between Nightingale and Boston Heart Diagnostics Corporation to sell Nightingale's Health Check service in the US. The agreement includes a pilot to assess the potential for a broader roll-out. In addition, the parties have signed a letter of intent on a long-term strategic partnership to export Nightingale’s services to healthcare operators in the US. The parties aim to start the pilot project by August 2024 at the latest.

Although the partnership has no financial impact on Nightingale during the pilot phase and its success is still a long way off, the release continues the series of positive news announced by Nightingale over the past year. The commercialization of the company's technology seems to be gaining further momentum, but signs of scaling up customers to a significant size are still to be patiently awaited.

The partnership is not immediately reflected in the figures, but if successful, it is a significant step for the company in opening the market to the US

Boston Heart is an innovative heart health company based in Massachusetts, USA, that offers advanced diagnostic tests to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses.

The goal of the strategic partnership is to utilize Nightingale Health’s blood analysis technology in Boston Heart’s services in the US. The partnership begins with piloting and gradually progresses toward continuous service, after which Nightingale’s Health Check service will be widely available to Boston Heart’s customers. The parties will work together to introduce Nightingale Health's innovative solutions to the US market, with Boston Heart acting as the seller and distributor of the service to healthcare providers.

Even though the partnership is not yet visible in Nightingale’s revenue in the pilot phase, opening the US market in healthcare use would be a very significant step for the company’s business development. At this stage, it is still a pilot, and it is not self-evident that it will advance to a wider use, but naturally, the pursuit of this alone makes the partnership interesting.

The partnership continues the company’s positive news stream. In April, Nightingale landed a contract in the US to analyze samples from Kaiser Permanente's biobank and a letter of intent with Weill Cornell Medicine. We see both as opportunities to later move to the continued use of Nightingale blood tests in clinical practice, and for the latter this was directly stated as one of the objectives in the letter of intent. Nightingale has also published a collaboration with US-based Mass General Brigham, with similar features, and the Boston Heart partnership announced now also aims for similar clinical use.

Nightingale has developed good customer relationships over the past few months, and if successful they support our predictions of strong revenue growth in the coming years. More important for reducing the risk level of the stock is, however, the success in scaling up the accounts (in particular Terveystalo and Pathology Asia) and improved visibility to the slope of the company’s revenue growth, but gaining a track record here will still take time. However, the progress of the ramp-up of the Terveystalo account seems to be the first piece of such evidence.