Category: Startups

Spotlight on Employers, Thatch and Sounder

Posted on by Jason Barry

Help is on the way for employers grappling with rising healthcare costs after two separate startups closed funding to tailor benefits to the needs of employees.

Thatch raised a $38M Series A to dislodge health coverage from employment by providing individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements (ICHRA) that let employees choose their own benefit plans.

  • By blending fin-tech and health-tech tools, Thatch gives employers a way to “abstract away the complexity” of the ICHRA law that passed in 2020, which enabled them to provide a budget to employees for selecting health benefits based on their needs.
  • The Thatch platform streamlines budget setting, plan selection, and lowers costs through pooled purchasing power. If employees spend less than their budget, they receive a Thatch debit card to use for things like prescriptions, copays, and therapy.

Sounder Benefits hatched from the Redesign Health incubator with $7.5M to take a more hands-on approach to benefit design using AI-driven insights and strategic advisory services.

  • Sounder helps employers with <1k employees create a three-year benefit roadmap then guides their transition to level-funded and self-funded plans, providing HR teams with white-glove support and collecting revenue on a per member per month basis.
  • Using employee health data, Sounder identifies when employers have enough of a particular health need (like cancer support), then contracts with companies to provide access to solutions (like Jasper Health).

The back-to-back boost for benefits businesses arrives as employer healthcare costs are expected to spike 9% in 2025, surpassing $16k per employee.

  • Employers continue to bear the brunt of rising costs, and are looking for more ways to avoid passing expenses onto employees in a tight labor market.

The Takeaway

Most current health benefits solutions were designed for a workforce that stayed with a single company for most of their careers, and have had a tough time keeping up with today’s dynamic labor market. Thatch and Sounder Benefits are among a new pack of startups building the infrastructure for a modern benefits experience, and it seems like both employers and employees have a lot to look forward to.

CoachCare Locks Growth Capital for RPM Expansion

Posted on by Jason Barry

CoachCare locked in a $48M growth investment to advance its mission of becoming the go-to virtual care management platform for providers, and it has a clear blueprint for how it plans to get there.

After digging into CoachCare for the funding coverage, one of the things that jumped out the most was how well the company seems to be executing on the M&A front:

  • January 2017: CoachCare got its start as a virtual coaching platform for weight and lifestyle management programs.
  • January 2020: The pandemic era emergence of new RPM and CCM reimbursement pathways prompts CoachCare to lean in on commercializing the technologies it built to use internally, with a platform combining connected devices and outreach / monitoring services to give providers everything needed to spin up their own virtual care programs.
  • January 2023: CoachCare kicks off its acquisition spree with NVOLVE, a remote patient monitoring startup focused on MSK, pain management, and orthopedics.
  • April 2023: CoachCare scoops up Carbon Health’s cardiology and nephrology-focused healthcare platform – Alertive.
  • September 2023: WebCareHealth gets brought on to add new RPM, video conferencing, and real-time messaging expertise to the CoachCare platform.
  • December 2023: Verustat joins the portfolio to bolster CoachCare’s presence in primary care and cardiology.
  • June 2024: CoachCare also closed on another soon-to-be-announced acquisition just last month, which saw Dedica Health round out the solution suite with one-to-one care management and navigation.

The end result of all that M&A is that CoachCare now has a platform that can deliver specialized RPM and virtual health services for everything from hypertension and behavioral disorders to stroke recovery and high-risk pregnancies.

  • Along with $48M in newly raised capital, CoachCare just took a step up to the RPM big leagues, and will now be competing for many of the same customers as the established leaders in the space.

The Takeaway

CoachCare is pedal to the metal with its M&A playbook, and an extra $48M pretty much guarantees that more acquisitions are right around the corner. As long as CoachCare continues finding attractive targets for reasonable costs, its next arc of growth will be defined by its ability to execute, hire, and integrate new capabilities into a cohesive offering.

Commure Acquires Augmedix As Ambient AI Race Heats Up

Posted on by Jason Barry

Commure is buying the dip in Augmedix, and it isn’t leaving a single share behind.

The take-private transaction will see Commure acquire Augmedix for $139M, which means shareholders are set to receive $2.35 per share – a 150% premium above their last close.

  • Not bad for an overnight return, but then again Augmedix was trading at nearly $6 back in January.

Commure provides a healthcare-focused operating system that connects patient care, clinical operations, and administrative functions into a single interface powered by AI.

  • Since merging with Athelas late last year, Commure’s solution suite has grown to include everything from patient engagement and RPM to revenue cycle management and staff safety.
  • Commure also recently announced its own Commure Scribe documentation solution, which it made available at no cost to providers and will continue to offer alongside Augmedix’s product portfolio.

Augmedix got its start as a tech-focused VC darling before leaning in on scribing, and it took an interesting path to its current position near the front of the ambient AI pack.

  • October 2020: Augmedix hits the OTC market through a SPAC merger
  • October 2021: Augmedix gets uplisted to the NASDAQ with a $40M public offering
  • July 2024: Augmedix gets taken private once again by Commure 

The acquisition makes Commure a newfound powerhouse in the healthcare AI arena, with a strong foothold in one of the hottest corners of the market. 

  • Not only does Augmedix advance Commure’s strategy of using LLMs to consolidate various point solutions into a unified platform, but it also brings along over 20 health system partners – including a marquee collaboration with HCA.

The Takeaway

The ambient AI consolidation has begun, and Commure just fast-tracked its way to a leadership position. Commure has its work cut out for it to prove that its operating system approach makes Augmedix more valuable than the market gave it credit for, but this could mark the start of a new wave of consolidation if it can pull it off.

Huma Raises $80M to Shopify Healthcare

Posted on by Jason Barry

Our readers know better than anyone that building scalable digital health solutions can be a years-long voyage, which is why Huma Therapeutics closed $80M in Series D funding “to help cut that time down to days.”

Huma will be the first one to let you know that it’s the “Shopify for Digital Health,” offering modular platforms / software development kits that help provider orgs and pharmaceutical companies with use cases such as:

  • multi-channel patient engagement across entire populations
  • scalable remote patient monitoring programs
  • companion apps to support patients through treatment and drug therapies
  • digital clinical trials, including de-centralised trials to accelerate research

That technology has powered projects in over 3,000 hospitals and clinics, with 1.8M active users across its products in 70+ countries.

  • Huma’s partners include providers like the NHS and Johns Hopkins University, as well as pharma giants like Bayer and AstraZeneca – which also participated in the round.
  • The Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) behind Huma’s products also recently became the only configurable, disease-agnostic solution fully cleared by regulators in the U.S., E.U., and Saudi Arabia.

Up next is the Huma Cloud Platform, a no-code app builder that enables other companies to spin up their own solutions using a combination of GenAI prompts and pre-built templates.

  • The platform includes a library of modules and device connectivity tools for any therapeutic area, APIs and integration capabilities, and a marketplace that creates a flywheel of new features from existing users.
  • The best part? Huma’s SaMD clearance “solves all of the regulatory hurdles that developers usually face, freeing up their time and energy” to scale their apps.

Put it all together, and Huma’s tech infrastructure, partner roster, and regulatory grounding make a compelling case that we’re closer to a “Shopify for Digital Health” than we’ve ever been.

The Takeaway

Shopify brought an online presence within arms reach of millions of vendors that wouldn’t have had the resources to pull it off without them, and Huma is looking to make that same experience possible in digital health. Although healthcare is a far cry from slinging t-shirts and cookies, enabling people to focus on their craft instead of technical potholes seems like an end-goal worth striving for in any industry.

K Health Closes $50M to Bring AI to Primary Care

Posted on by Jason Barry

Momentum begets momentum, and K Health is building on the recent debut of its AI Knowledge Agent with the close of $50M in equity funding led by Claure Group.

K Health is on a mission to provide access to high-quality medical care at scale by using AI to turn patient smartphones into the first stop along their care journey.

  • K’s clinical-grade AI for primary care takes patients through a personalized chat to walk through their symptoms, develops an assessment grounded in the EHR, then delivers insights to providers to inform their diagnoses and treatments.
  • This allows providers to practice at the top of their license and engage with their patients instead of spending valuable time manually piecing together relevant information.

We unpacked K’s AI Knowledge Agent when it was first unveiled, but the short-and-sweet version is that it’s composed of an array of LLMs enhanced by K’s own algorithms, with a few key differentiators from today’s standard AI applications:

  • It incorporates the patient’s medical history to provide highly tailored responses, enabling a higher level of personalization than standalone models.
  • It’s optimized for accuracy by using curated sources, then leverages multiple specialized agents to verify the answer matches the sources and the EHR data is appropriate.

A core component of K’s blueprint is partnering with health systems to serve as an entry point to their larger care ecosystem, and Cedars-Sinai has been helping co-develop a longitudinal care program that integrates virtual care with in-person services.

  • By combining K’s AI with the patient’s EHR and Cedars-Sinai’s brick-and-mortar assets, patients can be intelligently routed to the right place to resolve their needs, reaching everything from primary care and specialists to labs and tests within the same interface.

K’s competitive advantage is its ability to do more with less. An AI-led model that eliminates the need to build clinics allows K to achieve better outcomes at lower costs than traditional primary care, and profitability looks like it’s in the forecast for next year.

  • The fresh funds will be used to fuel more health system partnerships and continue sharpening K’s AI, which should in turn allow it to keep improving the unit economics that separate it from the likes of Walmart Health (RIP) and VillageMD.

The Takeaway

Primary care is the gateway to the healthcare system, but that gateway is rusting away from the demands of an aging population and a shortage of providers. K Health is setting out to prove that AI can repair the situation, and it now has $50M to help it make its case.

Foodsmart Loads Its Plate With $200M

Posted on by Jason Barry

The headliner of this week’s funding-heavy news lineup was Foodsmart, which loaded its plate with over $200 million to expand the reach of its virtual nutrition services.

Foodsmart supports patients facing chronic disease and food insecurity by partnering with health plans and providers to improve access to personalized healthy eating options.

  • The FoodSMART telenutrition platform delivers virtual nutrition counseling from the largest standalone network of Registered Dietitians in the US, with integrated benefits management to help with things like applying for SNAP/EBT benefits.
  • The FoodsMART marketplace then bridges the gap between the visit and the table, allowing patients to order quality food and have it delivered to their doorstep.

The combination of Foodsmart’s dietitian network and food marketplace sets it apart from most of its competitors, which either focus on supporting specific conditions or avoid tackling the logistics of grocery delivery.

  • That versatility has led to Foodsmart serving over 2.2M members, as well as numerous peer-reviewed studies highlighting the cost reductions and health improvements resulting from the approach.

The food-as-medicine movement has provided fertile ground for startups since the pandemic, with shifting consumer behaviors and regulatory changes planting the seeds for growth.

  • Investors are taking notice, and Foodsmart’s mega-round follows close behind other raises from Season Health ($7M), Fay ($25M), and Nourish ($35M).

The Takeaway

At a time when weight management medications are getting all the attention, Foodsmart is paving its own non-pharmacological path to preventing diet-related issues. If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then $200M should be heavy enough to help Foodsmart improve the lives of plenty of patients.

Talkiatry Hauls in $130M Series C

Posted on by Jason Barry

Times are tough, which means business is booming for virtual behavioral health providers like Talkiatry – a telepsychiatry startup that just hauled in $130M in Series C funding.

Since launching in 2020, Talkiatry has built a network of over 320 psychiatrists, who serve patients with conditions ranging from anxiety and depression to OCD and PTSD.

  • Talkiatry operates in 43 states, and is in-network with more than 60 payors, reportedly covering 70% of commercial lives in the US.
  • It’s also begun leaning in on partnerships with health systems, and recently scored a major contract with HCA Healthcare.

Unlike most behavioral telehealth companies that got their start at the onset of the pandemic, Talkiatry’s physicians are W-2 employees, rather than contractors.

  • This allows Talkiatry to standardize the quality of physician care and influence patient outcomes over time, crucial ingredients to any recipe for value-based care success.
  • That model also makes Talkiatry one of the few companies that can demonstrate superior outcomes to major payors. A recent cohort study showed that Talkiatry led to a 68% reduction in hospitalizations, 32% fewer ED visits, and $700 lower monthly care costs.

The benefits of Talkiatry’s model compound with scale: as its full-time psychiatrists continue demonstrating superior outcomes, it can sign more partnerships with payors and reach more patients. That puts it in a solid position to take on additional risk.

  • Talkiatry earmarked the fresh funds to scale up its VBC offerings and begin taking on more downside risk, a move that few behavioral health companies have been willing to make given the difficulty of proving performance. “There’s no blood test for depression.”

The Takeaway

Demand for behavioral health resources only continues to climb, yet there are still significant barriers to delivering the care that’s being called for – particularly a shortage of providers and a lack of technology to help fill the gap. Talkiatry overcomes both of these hurdles by offering virtual treatment from in-house psychiatrists, and it now has $130M to continue scaling its model for patients in need.

Sword Health Lands $130M, Unveils Phoenix AI

Posted on by Jason Barry

Sword Health is officially on a hot streak, and it’s only going to keep turning up the heat with $130 million in fresh funding and a new AI care specialist named Phoenix.

At a time when many startups are taking down rounds – at lower valuations – to secure more capital, Sword just did a mic drop round. It’s valuation spiked 50% to a cool $3 billion.

  • Sword expects to be profitable before the end of the year, and said it didn’t need any financial help to get there.
  • Besides the valuation refresh, Sword also wanted to give its employees some long-awaited liquidity. That’s why $100 million of the funding was secondary (shares from employees) and the other $30 million is reportedly locked away “generating nice interest.”

Founded in 2014, Sword pairs motion tracking technology with in-house clinicians to deliver virtual physical therapy programs for muscle and joint issues. 

  • Employers and health plans have flocked to digital musculoskeletal solutions to help members manage pain from home while avoiding opioids and costly surgeries, attracting competition from both well-funded giants (Hinge, Omada) and agile startups (Kaia, Vori).

Sword’s next chapter will focus on finishing the pre-IPO puzzle, and it just locked in one of the most important pieces: Phoenix, an AI care specialist that chats with patients during sessions to assess how they’re feeling and provide real-time feedback.

  • As patients move through the exercises, Phoenix factors in medical history and verbal feedback to deliver optimal sessions within the human clinician’s pre-set parameters.
  • It then summarizes the performance data to identify trends and surface actionable insights, making it easier for clinicians to optimize patient progress.

The icing on the cake? The Peterson Health Technology Institute highlighted Sword in an impeccably timed report on the clinical advantages of virtual MSK solutions as an effective alternative to in-person care – a glowing review compared to their harsh critique of digital diabetes programs.

The Takeaway

It sends a clear signal when a company raises nine figures just to flaunt its valuation and show its employees some love. Sword is in peak form as it gears up for an initial public offering, and it sounds like we could see a move as early as 2025 if the IPO market continues to rise from the ashes.

Atropos Series B Bridges Evidence Gaps

Posted on by Jason Barry

It’s a bad day to be an evidence gap, with Atropos Health closing $33M in Series B funding to transmute real-world data into real-world evidence.

Atropos accomplishes this alchemy by quickly producing retroactive observational studies using an evidence platform of 200M+ patient records, as well as a partner network packed with big names like Mayo Clinic and Clarify.

  • These publication-grade “Prognostograms” are used by both providers (e.g. to answer clinical questions using individually tailored RWE) and life science orgs (e.g. to emulate clinical trials that otherwise would have taken a lot longer).
  • Forbes has a solid write-up of the secret sauce on the backend – plus a nice Greek mythology lesson on the three fates whose scissors can either end or extend the lives of mortals, one of which is named Atropos.

The fresh funding will fuel a trio of initiatives centered around new ways to democratize access to RWE, which naturally includes a healthy dose of generative AI.

  • Atropos plans to “further its stake” in value-based care by continuing to invest in tailored evidence to guide clinical decisions (see its recent partnership with Arcadia), notable given that “the low hanging fruit” of VBC is mostly gone and providers are now looking for more support with complicated patients to succeed in risk-based contracts.
  • The Atropos Evidence Network is pushing into oncology and specialty care through new partnerships with McKesson and Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen), and Atropos intends to “double down” on life sciences collaborations after finding traction with everything from R&D to commercial use cases.
  • The full launch of ChatRWD is now slated for this summer, which is an LLM-independent framework built to eliminate hallucination risk while slashing the time needed to produce reports using a chat-based interface. A pending publication will back the great branding with some actual data in the coming months.

The Takeaway

Healthcare doesn’t have any problem generating data, but it’s proven to be a massive challenge to turn these troves of data into actionable evidence. Bridging that gap isn’t exactly a small undertaking, but Atropos now has $33M to make it happen.

Providence Spins Out Praia Health After Series A

Posted on by Jason Barry

The rockstar team over at Providence’s Digital Innovation Group officially spun out its fourth digital health startup: Praia Health.

Praia Health is making its grand debut armed with $20M in Series A funding to help hospitals avoid the commoditized care caravan by building deeper relationships with their patients.

To accomplish that, Praia enables the creation of robust consumer profiles that extend beyond the medical record, which might finally give providers a way to build the “digital flywheels” enjoyed in other consumer industries.

Here’s how it works (perfectly explained in these short videos):

  • The first step is a “lift and shift” to Praia’s Secure Patient Identity Service (SPI). Once transitioned, SPI seamlessly supports all of the system’s signed-in digital experiences (branded mobile and web apps, patient portals, etc.).
  • Praia Health’s PersonStore then enables health system’s to marry consumer identity with consumer data, securely synchronizing the EMR with outside data sources to connect-the-dots between consumer data and outcomes. 
  • Those SPI and PersonStore capabilities lay the groundwork for a new class of digital experiences that reflect the health system’s unique brand and offerings, assisted by a full suite of development tools to integrate Praia into existing solutions.
  • Once those consumer experiences are available, the flywheel is fueled by adding more solutions to Praia’s partner ecosystem. The platform delivers all of these solutions through a single scalable experience.

Although Praia has some lofty goals, Providence’s incubation model carries some massive advantages that might make them possible.

  • Praia has been in use at the 51 hospital system since January 2022, and already supports over 3.5 million user accounts.
  • Indiana-based Community Health Network is already lined up as Praia’s first post-launch implementation.
  • The aforementioned partner ecosystem is debuting with a whopping 17 startups on-board, including Omada, Wellthy, Kyruus, and Season.

The Takeaway

Although there’s no doubt that Praia’s mission is ambitious, it’s equally apparent that Providence brings plenty of advantages that other founders can only dream of. Providence has a solid track record with its incubator (see: Xealth, DexCare, Circle), and all signs are pointing to Praia keeping that streak alive.

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