Category: Startups

General Medicine Lands $120M to Build the Store

Posted on by Jason Barry

Everybody is using AI to see what they need to improve their health, but that doesn’t mean they have a store that’s magically stocked with that care. That is unless General Medicine builds it with the $120M Series B it just raised.

CEO TJ Parker has been here before. When he first noticed healthcare’s lack of great consumer experiences circa 2012, he decided to build his own – PillPack.

  • PillPack didn’t grow to hundreds of millions in revenue through better contracts or technology, it got there by creating a pharmacy that consumers “actually loved using.”
  • What do consumers love? Seeing actual prices, comparing their options, and choosing the one that works best for them. 

General Medicine brings that same ethos to… general medicine. Who would’ve thought.

Say Dr. AI tells you to check your cholesterol. To turn that advice into care, you still have to identify the right test, determine if you need an order, and find somewhere you can go to get it. 

  • If the result comes back high, the same problem repeats with treatment.
  • What you need is a store. Easier said than done in healthcare (per usual).

Take the cholesterol example:

  • Clinicians, payers, and labs might all have different definitions for the same test.
  • Two tests that look identical can be clinically different.
  • Other times they’re identical in every way that matters except billing. 

General Medicine is the missing product catalog. It put 2,900 distinct medications, labs, telehealth visits, and select in-person care in a single searchable store.

  • GM doesn’t provide all that care itself. It lets you browse options from its own medical group, or connect with clinicians anywhere in the country through the same storefront.
  • That works because GM defines the product first, then maps everything back to it. The store then combines benefits, contracted rates, and manufacturer discounts to show customers what their care will actually cost before they decide.

Product definitions are only half the problem. You also have to understand your customer. GM gathers an average of 11 years of health history for each of its customers.

  • When you search for a cholesterol test, GM already has your history and coverage information, so you can easily compare labs and treatment options if needed.
  • For $15, a GM clinician will review your history and results, determine which treatments are appropriate, and help make any changes if there’s side effects down the road.

Sound too good to be true? Maybe, but a16z believed in the vision enough to lead a nine-figure round, and the store won’t have any problem getting people through the door if it can recreate some of the consumer magic we’ve already seen with certain packaged pill companies.

The Takeaway

Healthcare has always been organized by who delivers care, not what someone is trying to accomplish. General Medicine is building its store the other way around, and $120M should be enough to tell which way consumers prefer.

Heidi Closes Series C and Sets Sights on Clinical Work

Posted on by Jason Barry

Heidi Health just raised $340M at a $900M valuation, which is about $1.4B in their native AUD so they might technically koala-fy as a unicorn.

One round, two vehicles. The funds were split between a $100M Series C led by Blackbird, and $240M in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund.

  • GC’s Customer Value Fund takes a capped slice of revenue instead of equity so that “companies with good unit economics can push their growth engine without spending their own balance sheet on it.”
  • That not only suggests that GC views Heidi as one of the fastest horses in the ambient scribe race, it also shows that Heidi would rather take on a revenue-share than a company-share. Confidence is key.

The scribe days are over. Heidi was one of the early pioneers of direct-to-clinician AI with its ambient scribe, but it’s since evolved into a complete AI Care Partner for the entire enterprise.

  • This video from CEO Tom Kelly, MD has a great overview of that journey, and explains why Heidi developed its task-specific models that “run circles around the frontier labs” on safety and accuracy.
  • That allowed Heidi to move beyond documentation into aggregating medical evidence at the bedside, routing tasks across the care team, and answering millions of clinical questions every month.

It also helped the platform spread like wildfire. Heidi hit 90% retention before it even had a sales team, and hiring one turned it into one of the most rapidly adopted platforms in healthcare:

  • Supporting 2.8M visits every week across 190 countries and 110 languages. 
  • Scaling ARR from $1M to $50M in two years.
  • Expanding in the U.S. with partners like Beth Israel Lahey, MaineGeneral, and Monash.

What’s on the horizon? Clinical work. Heidi is honing its focus on getting the clerical paperwork off clinicians’ desks, while keeping the medical judgment solely on human shoulders.

  • That means introducing new AI agents to perform the tasks weighing down clinicians outside of visits. “Pre-charting. Chasing diagnostics. Operational friction.”

The Takeaway

Heidi exists “to double the world’s capacity for care.” It’s a big mission, but fair dinkum, and Heidi knows it won’t get there by compiling a list of tasks then handing it back to a clinician to complete. That’s why it raised $340M to build the agents that complete them.

OpenEvidence’s Quiet Raise and Loud Pivot

Posted on by Jason Barry

OpenEvidence just inked a major partnership as it breaks into drug development, and it didn’t even make a fuss about the mega-round it raised to fuel it.

Let’s start with the partnership. OpenEvidence is teaming up with Memorial Sloan Kettering and was generous with the details when explaining the move to Forbes.

  • The collaboration itself was fairly straightforward. MSK is plugging OE into its Epic workflows, and OE is integrating MSK’s OncoKB precision oncology database into its engine to let physicians access the treasure trove of data on genetic variants of different cancers and their treatments.

The fine print was huge. A single sentence bolted onto a paragraph in the middle of the Forbes article revealed that OE quietly raised $250M at a $15B valuation last week. For context:

  • January – $250M at $12B, with a big announcement and press tour for CEO Daniel Nadler.
  • July – The Information reported OE was weighing a $200M raise at $20B.
  • September – $250M at $15B, revealed in a blurb sandwiched between partner coverage.

Not necessarily a down round, but the silence was deafening. Especially considering how much other OE news has been hitting the wire recently:

  • a new family of four AI models featuring Darwin, the first AI in history to score a perfect 100% on the MedQA benchmark.
  • a partnership with Anthropic to give physicians in 100 lower-income countries open access to OE’s clinical decision support.

But wait, there’s more. Nadler told Forbes that OE plans to start developing its own oncology therapies, with the first drug entering clinical trials before year-end and another three candidates on the way next year, starting with rare cancers. 

  • Bit of a head scratcher, but OE isn’t planning to compete with Lilly or Pfizer on 10,000-patient trials. It’s going after “the stuff that they are not doing, and maybe can’t do” because they don’t have OE’s “economies of scale in finding these patients.”

Why go after drug development? Probably the same reason as the funding radio silence – competition is compounding.

  • As OE expands from clinical search into nearby workflows, it’s not only bumping up against Wolters Kluwer and Elsevier, it’s also competing with new heavyweights like Abridge and Doximity.
  • Abridge has giant friends in the pharma space and is only making more, while Doximity just reported a blowout quarter on the back of its solutions that compete directly with OE. 
  • Doximity’s call also snuck in a rumor that an unnamed “major system” is cracking down on shadow AI and banning a product from a direct competitor. Maybe OE, maybe true.

The Takeaway

For all the AI fearmongering that’s been going on recently, it’s nice to see OpenEvidence randomly decide to cure cancer, regardless of the valuation it hit while funding the new quest.

Medallion Gets Its M&A Credentials

Posted on by Jason Barry

Medallion continues building its case to be the go-to platform for provider network management after making its first acquisition with Andros, and it sounds like the shopping spree is just getting started.

Less friction, more healthcare. Providers have to jump through countless operational and compliance hoops before they can start caring for patients, and Medallion specializes in AI-powered hoop jumping.

  • Medallion helps automate away the back-office workflows that delay care – and revenue – such as credentialing, enrollment, and monitoring.
  • The platform not only onboards providers 40x faster, but it also serves as a unified system of record that allows customers to verify credentials, stay in-network, and connect patients to care more efficiently.
  • It also recently unveiled the industry’s first national credentialing clearinghouse, CredAlliance.

Here’s where Andros fits in. Andros has over 13 years of experience as an accredited CVO verifying provider qualifications for commercial payers, health systems, and regional medical groups.

  • It’s built more than 200 provider networks across all 50 states and processes upwards of 300k annual credentialing files.
  • Those customers will now be brought onto the Medallion platform, gaining new AI agents to handle provider outreach and follow-up, real-time status tracking, and human credentialing specialists Medallion embeds alongside its automation.

That makes Medallion the largest credentialing platform out there. It now manages over a million providers across 400+ orgs, but it’s already setting its sights on more M&A.

  • Healthcare is a collection of thousands of billion-dollar markets, and Medallion has the team and funding in place to integrate the pieces that ultimately get providers paid.
  • It’s eyeing companies that are removing the friction to make that happen faster, whether that’s in credentialing, onboarding, compliance, or elsewhere along the way.

The Takeaway

Credentialing is one of the last big administrative functions still running mostly on manual labor, and so far vertical AI plays have barely touched it. Medallion is making the play, and Andros gives it a wider footprint and more momentum to help pull it off.

Oura Gets Ready to Ring the Bell

Posted on by Jason Barry

It didn’t take long for the Oura IPO rumors to turn into a bonafide S-1, giving us the first real look under the hood of a consumer health company looking to get its AI healthcare platform credentials (and the valuation that comes with them).

Oura’s been busy polishing up the balance sheet. The smart ring OG is on its way to ring the Nasdaq bell ($OURA) with the kind of financials most digital health companies only dream of:

  • $1.2B in revenue for the nine months ended June 30, up 74% YoY.
  • $61M net income on 55% gross margins, up from $1.6M in the same period last year.
  • 5M paid members wearing their ring 23 hours a day. 

Not too shabby. The last bullet is especially impressive, made possible by 94% of activations converting to memberships with a juicy 85% annual retention.

  • Bloomberg reports that Oura is seeking $3B at a $16B+ valuation, up from the $11B notch in its valuation belt that it earned in last October’s $900M Series E.

Those definitely aren’t jewelry numbers. Oura has been positioning itself as an AI-powered health platform sitting on 42B hours of longitudinal biometric data, a dataset that grew 83% in the past nine months alone.

  • It also boasts 1,200+ integration partners that feed clinical data back into the platform. 
  • The member base also looks more like a patient population than the fitness crowd most people would expect: 72% women, more than half reporting at least one chronic condition, and 37% with household incomes under $100k.

Small healthcare beachheads are still beachheads. Oura backs up the health platform by bringing its ring to places like Essence Healthcare’s MA plan (where roughly a third of members opted in), a Cigna benefit collaboration, Lumeris’ care pathways, and Maven Clinic.

  • There’s also the recent Counsel Health partnership that put AI-guided physician consults directly inside the Oura app, and a nice industry ally in partner-turned-investor Dexcom.

Now for the best part of any S-1: the risk factors. Memberships are only 20% of revenue, so this is still a hardware business at its core. 

There’s also a nice pearl about early investors reportedly cashing out $1.09B before the public gets its turn, and a well-timed class action to challenge the accuracy of Oura’s sleep staging numbers.

The Takeaway

Every company has its risk factors, but we’ll always cheer for a big digital health-ish exit. That said, Oura’s S-1 spent a lot of pages telling the SEC what it won’t promise for a company selling “predictive health.”

Bunkerhill Lands Series B to Turn Ideas Into Action

Posted on by Jason Barry

Bunkerhill Health might take its name from a short-lived medical drama, but all signs point to it sticking around for the long haul after landing $25M of Series B funding from a stacked investor roster led by Khosla Ventures.

Bunkerhill isn’t going after one workflow at a time. Its Carebricks platform lets health systems transform their ideas into AI agents that work across any clinical or operational use case – turning the data that hospitals already generate into action for the patients who need it.

  • That includes everything from automating administrative work and navigating prior auths to reviewing cardiac imaging for early signs of heart disease.
  • The value prop propelled Bunkerhill’s revenue over 20x just last year, which no doubt helped attract big names like Sequoia, Optum Ventures, and Y Combinator to the round.

The pitch flips the usual script. Instead of a vendor showing up with a fixed solution, health systems bring the clinical judgment and the problems that need solving.

  • Carebricks brings the execution, running the work as AI agents that reason across disparate data sources, take real action, and grow more capable as they work together.

The proof is in the customer pudding. Carebricks is live at over 15 health systems, including some familiar faces like Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Health, and the University of Texas Medical Branch.

UTMB alone has 20+ agents in production across the organization:

  • In its first month, a coronary calcium detection agent flagged a patient at imminent risk of a heart attack, leading to a life-saving triple bypass.
  • A nephrology triage agent cut specialist wait times by more than 50% by escalating urgent cases and routing others to telemedicine.
  • A lung nodule agent addressed urgent incidental findings 80% faster and doubled guideline-concordant follow-ups.

Vinod Khosla summed it up well: the bottleneck in healthcare AI was never the technology, it was getting health systems to actually run it.

  • Bunkerhill will use the new capital to expand Carebricks to new partners, while also expanding the platform’s capabilities so existing partners have even more ways to actually run it. 

The Takeaway

Healthcare has plenty of good ideas. It even has a couple that eventually end up improving care. Bunkerhill is making sure fewer good ideas get lost along the way, and it just raised $25M to fine-tune its compass.

Optura Closes Series A for ROAI Platform

Posted on by Jason Barry

The only thing healthcare orgs love more than AI is ROI, and Optura just raised $17.5M of Series A funding to give them the best of both worlds with its ROAI platform.

It’s time for a Return on AI Investment. Leadership teams across the industry are facing tighter margins, more compliance exposure, and heightened board scrutiny around their AI investments.

  • As payers and providers shift AI gears from proof-of-concept to performance, the big question becomes which initiatives – if any – are driving measurable value.

That’s where Optura comes in. The ROAI platform is designed to answer three key questions. 

  • How healthy is our AI program?
  • Which of our AI initiatives are generating a return?
  • Does our roadmap support further innovation?

Optura takes a three-pronged approach to finding the answers. First, it works directly with C-suites to get organized around AI and evaluate ideas against their business priorities.

  • That looks like systematically mapping an organization’s existing data into a unified knowledge layer so every decision is grounded in how that org operates. 
  • It then scores and ranks use cases against organizational priorities, cost, and readiness before translating the top priorities into AI agents. Optura’s forward-deployed engineers help operationalize the agents while making sure they stay aligned with key priorities.
  • The third step (that many companies still miss) is closing the loop. Optura continuously measures how AI contributes back into the P&L, quality scores, and care delivery – creating a flywheel that strengthens future initiatives.

The traction metrics back up the strategy.  

  • Optura actively manages $2B of AI initiatives through the platform.
  • It’s tracked over $120M of new value – otherwise known as ROAI.
  • More than 250 healthcare AI use cases have been identified as value-drivers.

The Takeaway

Optura could probably crush it just by sitting on the trademark for ROAI. Instead, it raised $17.5M to build real relationships with healthcare orgs and prove why “its love language is showing value.”

Nourish Cooks Up $100M of Series C Funding

Posted on by Jason Barry

Nearly 200M Americans are hungry for help managing a nutrition-related chronic condition, so Nourish just raised $100M of Series C funding to fill their plates with AI-native metabolic care.

Nourish is a proactive substitute for a reactive recipe. Its entire virtual metabolic clinic is purpose-built to tackle chronic conditions before problems start to escalate.

  • The care model revolves around nutrition-first interventions, but it’s the fully coordinated wraparound support that transforms access into better long-term outcomes.
  • The secret ingredient? Dietitians… plus AI, obviously.

Over the last four years, Nourish has grown into the country’s largest dietitian-led metabolic health clinic, with a roster of over 10,000 Registered Dietitians.

  • Every Nourish patient works with an RD to work through a comprehensive care plan – with lab testing, GLP-1 prescribing, and medication management all baked in if needed.
  • Patients also receive a personal AI agent to support behavior change and coordinate with other providers. These reportedly have “hundreds of thousands of MAUs and world-class engagement metrics.”
  • The RDs are equipped with their own AI agents to help surface insights, automate administrative work, and improve quality of care.

The outcomes are the main course. Nourish patients see an average of: 

  • 8% weight loss
  • 1.3-point A1C reduction
  • 31-point LDL reduction
  • 23-point systolic BP reduction

GLP-1s are the dessert people can’t get enough of. Despite demand for metabolic care exploding alongside the rise of GLP-1s, medication alone is rarely enough – only 46% of patients stay on GLP-1s at six months, and most who quit regain the weight.

  • Nourish’s care model shines here too. Over two-thirds of Nourish patients remain on GLP-1s at six months, and they lose 33% more weight on their way there.

The Takeaway

Nutrition support has been covered by insurance for over a decade, yet only a tiny fraction of those who could benefit ever actually use it. GLP-1s changed that demand equation, and Nourish just loaded its plate with $100M to give people the access they’re suddenly craving.

Enhanced Goes Public With World Record Twist

Posted on by Jason Barry

The Enhanced Group just kept the digital health SPAC dream alive with its public market debut, but it took more than some juiced up athletes to justify its billion dollar valuation.

What if the Olympics allowed steroids? Next week’s Enhanced Games might be the answer.

Enhanced made a big splash when it first announced the events kicking off in Vegas this Sunday. It’s easy to see why:

  • Athletes – 50
  • Events – Swimming, Track, Weightlifting, Strongman
  • World Record Bounty – $25,000,000
  • Performance Enhancing Drugs – Go for it. There’s no testing.

That’ll definitely pull viewers. It’s also only a sliver of Enhanced’s actual gameplan.

  • Every event is open to the public, at no cost, and so are the media rights. The entire spectacle is designed to get social media clips and as many eyeballs as possible.
  • It might sound like Enhanced is building a new-gen marketing company, but it’s actually building a patient funnel that most telehealth companies could only dream of.

The real revenue comes after the records are broken. Earlier this month, Enhanced quietly added some sleek new buttons to its website. They all point to Live Enhanced.

  • Live Enhanced is a direct-to-consumer telehealth platform that offers the full catalogue of 2026 trending medications. Peptites, GLP-1s, TRT, you name it.
  • While other startups are busy peddling these with nothing but fake doctor Facebook accounts, Enhanced is doing it with genuine world records and famous athletes.

Telehealth makes more than TikTok. Enhanced has been putting the athletes that are participating in the games through a gauntlet of clinical studies using the drugs available on Live Enhanced. 

  • Every dose, every rep, and every rest is getting packaged into protocols for fans and patients alike. 
  • If an athlete breaks a record, they’ll probably have people lining up to try their protocol – even if Live Enhanced doesn’t mention a few extracurricular enhancements.

The Takeaway

Despite all the hype around the Games, Enhanced’s real product is the protocols – the rest is just lead gen. It’s the same blueprint as Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint, only on steroids;)

Photon Raises $16M to Power Up Prescriptions

Posted on by Jason Barry

Electronic prescribing was designed to move prescriptions from point A to point B, not to give patients the information needed to pick those points on the spot. Photon just raised $16M in Series A funding to fill that gap.

Photon got its start in 2021 building prescription infrastructure for direct-to-consumer telehealth companies, powering some of the fastest-growing brands of the pandemic and GLP-1 era.

That experience provided a solid foundation. Photon built deep integrations across pharmacy networks, real-time formulary data, and a patient-first prescribing experience.

  • That foundation not only proved compelling to DTC startups, but also to health systems looking for better ways to engage patients at the point of care and drive visibility into their in-house pharmacies. 
  • Fast forward to the Series A, and Photon is leaning in on the enterprise market where it can make the biggest impact.

Photon isn’t a pricing widget. It’s an end-to-end platform that includes:

  • Modern prescribing and routing infrastructure
  • A network of pharmacy partners across retail and home delivery
  • A consumer-facing marketplace that surfaces real-time price and stock information
  • A full suite of capabilities including prior auths and clinical decision support 

AI underpins everything. Photon’s AI ingests fragmented data across pharmacy networks, benefit structures, and formularies, then translates it into info that patients can actually use.

  • That gives patients a sense of what’s convenient, what’s covered, what delivery options are available, and most importantly – price. 
  • Put it all together, and patients can make informed choices before prescriptions ever get sent.

Health systems get something equally valuable. The prescription becomes a patient engagement touchpoint instead of a handoff.

  • In-house pharmacy teams gain real-time visibility into fill activity, and having patients that are actually informed results in fewer abandoned scripts, less reroutes, and a meaningfully better experience for everyone involved.

The Takeaway

Right when healthcare services are getting disrupted by LLMs and agents, patients are hitting a boiling point with affordability and transparency. The pharmacy experience is a major intersection for both roads, and Photon just raised $16M to modernize all four corners.

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