Category: Startups

Oura Lands $75M From Dexcom to Bring Smart Rings to Healthcare

Posted on by Jason Barry

Smart ring maker Oura is taking the leap into healthcare, and it just landed a major investment from Dexcom to help it cross the chasm.

Things are looking up for the creator of the Oura Ring. In just the last week:

  • Oura entered a strategic partnership with continuous glucose monitoring giant Dexcom, who also handed it $75M in Series D funding and vaulted its valuation to a whopping $5B.
  • The release of Oura’s Perimenopause Report was well-received for including a trove of hard-to-capture data and highlighting gaps in women’s health research.
  • Apple squashed rumors that it was developing its own smart ring, meaning that the category dodged the same bullet that saw Apple steal nearly half of the headphone market overnight when it first launched the AirPods.

Oura got its start in 2013 helping health-conscious consumers optimize their performance with insights into areas like sleep quality and heart rate variability.

  • It’s since shipped 2.5 million of its flagship Oura Ring and expects annual revenue to double to $500M before the end of 2024.
  • Within the last year, Oura also began making a string of acquisitions to support its user base along more parts of their health journey, picking up both Sparta Science (data analytics) and Veri (glucose monitoring and meal timing insights).

Dexcom is hot on the heels of releasing its first over-the-counter Stelo CGM for prediabetic populations, which already has 70k users and is reportedly a “gateway product” to expand into the broader metabolic health market.

  • The Oura partnership will enable two-way data flow between Dexcom biosensors and Oura wearables to provide “a first-of-its-kind metabolic health management experience,” with the first app integration expected in the first half of next year.
  • The duo will also be co-marketing and cross-selling each other’s products to attract new customers who want to better understand the link between sleep, activity, nutrition, and their glucose.

The Takeaway

Oura has been looking to support its massive user base with deeper insights into their overall health, and Dexcom has been searching for ways to get its glucose monitoring devices in front of a non-diabetic audience. This seems like a match made in heaven.

Babylon Founder Returns With Launch of Quadrivia

Posted on by Jason Barry

Babylon founder Ali Parsa is rising from the wreckage with a new startup – Quadrivia – and he’s certainly hoping that his second AI wonder app works out better than his first.

A LinkedIn post from Parsa laid out Quadrivia’s vision of using customizable AI agents to tackle “the main challenge” in healthcare: the structural imbalance between the elastic demand from our communities and the constrained supply of our clinicians.

  • Quadrivia’s undisclosed amount of seed funding was enough to kick off beta testing for Qu, a clinical assistant with “wide-ranging capabilities across the care spectrum.”
  • Qu’s agents have the lofty goal of assisting clinicians across the full stack of routine clinical and administrative tasks, patient interactions, decision-making, chronic and postoperative care, and continuous monitoring. 

Qu’s ambitious scope is reportedly made possible by its dual architecture: “System 1 includes tasks that rely on quick decision-making, such as answering direct questions. System 2 involves more complex tasks, like assessing patient symptoms and considering multiple diagnoses.”

  • These capabilities are supported by the patient’s EHR data (still working out the details), natural language conversations (but not real time), and a large clinical knowledge base (unclear from where).

The backstory of Quadrivia is inextricably linked to the backstory of Babylon, which has been called everything from the “future of the NHS” to “the Madoff of digital health.”

  • The grand promises of Babylon’s AI chatbot rhymed with the goals Qu outlined above, which was enough to fuel a $4.2B public market debut in 2021.
  • By this time last year, what we’ll call “difficulty living up to those promises” had Babylon shares trading at pennies, and it filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. after an odd takeover from digital therapeutics developer MindMaze turned out to be too good to be true.

The Takeaway

If Quadrivia is to succeed where Babylon failed, it’ll need a strategy that shores up the holes in its predecessor’s approach. That means peer-reviewed research, independent validation, and consistent messaging about Qu’s capabilities… and limitations.

Bessemer’s Key Benchmarks for Health Tech

Posted on by Jason Barry

Bessemer Venture Partners put out an update to its top-tier blog series on benchmarks that health tech startups can use to see how they stack up against the competition.

We won’t dive into the full industry overview, but here’s a look at a few of the key metrics Bessemer shared to illustrate how the health tech segment has evolved since last year.

Graduating is hard. Health tech “graduation rates” from Seed to Series A and B have fallen significantly compared to previous cohorts.

  • Of the companies closing Series A rounds, the median time it takes to reach that milestone is 50% longer in 2024 than prior years, and is longer in health tech than any other sector.

We’re so back. Although the funding environment remains challenging, the good news for those that are able to raise capital is that valuations have rebounded to peak levels.

  • “Phoenix” companies that have risen from the ashes of the market correction are commanding premium valuations in massive late stage rounds (see Equip and Maven), while frothy investments in AI startups are fueling an early stage boom.

The AI factor can’t be ignored. The share of health tech investment directed at AI-focused companies has increased by 9 percentage points in just two years – hitting 38% in 2024.

  • These startups are reaching 30-50x ARR multiples, with valuations 2-5x higher than their non-AI counterparts.

Services-as-Software is the new paradigm. These businesses use AI to automate workflows historically performed by humans, and benchmarks show an accelerated go-to-market trajectory compared to traditional SaaS models. 

  • Services-as-Software companies are reaching $10M ARR at unprecedented speeds as the industry rushes to test if they can deliver on their value promises, and the following chart has the full breakdown – at least for the readers that know their finance acronyms.

The Takeaway

Bessemer’s full post goes much deeper on the overall health tech landscape and the intricacies of AI Services-as-Software, but the four charts above give you a solid lay of the land. Bessemer remains as optimistic as ever on health tech heading into 2025, and it’s definitely impressive to see the resilience that these companies have showcased over the last year.

CopilotIQ and Biofourmis Merge to Build Single Pane Home Care

Posted on by Jason Barry

One of the biggest stories to come out of last week’s HLTH meetup was the surprise merger between Biofourmis and its under-the-radar remote care competitor CopilotIQ.

CopilotIQ launched a few short years ago in 2021 to provide remote patient monitoring for seniors managing chronic conditions through its High-Frequency Connected Care platform.

  • The platform combines clinical automation software with biomarker data, behavioral analytics, and nursing visits to better manage conditions like diabetes and hypertension.
  • The company has raised just $30M to-date, and was mostly operating in stealth as it grew its footprint to 11 states and “tens of thousands” of patients.

Biofourmis on the other hand is a Softbank-backed giant that reached unicorn status in 2022 as it closed its $300M Series D round, although we haven’t seen an update on that peak-pandemic valuation.

  • The focus for Biofourmis has centered on supporting health systems, payors, and pharma companies with in-home delivery of complex care using wearables, FDA-cleared algorithms, and a virtual specialty care ecosystem.
  • Its founder-CEO Kuldeep Rajput departed last year and recently transferred his shares to existing investors while launching a multimodal clinical AI startup called OutcomesAI.

The combined company will be helmed by CopilotIQ CEO David Koretz, who will oversee its transformation into an end-to-end home care solution across the full spectrum from pre-surgical optimization to acute, post-acute, and chronic care.

  • The announcement highlights the power of combining CopilotIQ’s consumer-facing business with Biofourmis’s enterprise customer expertise within a “single pane of glass” to view patients across the entire care continuum.
  • Tough to argue with the logic behind one integration, one security audit, simplified procurement, and a better user experience.

Outside of that, the only other info on the merger is that it’s an all-stock transaction that’ll see existing investors – including General Atlantic and Bessemer Venture Partners – pile in another $100M to attempt to bridge the gap to the public markets.

The Takeaway

At a time when valuations are quickly heading back to earth and exits are hard to come by, Biofourmis and CopilotIQ’s merger has all the tell-tale signs of an investor-driven union, and the smaller company’s CEO will now get a shot at proving platforms beat point solutions for in-home care.

Oshi Lands $60M Series C for Virtual GI Care

Posted on by Jason Barry

Oshi Health just found 60 million reasons why becoming the first virtual gastrointestinal center of excellence in the U.S. was a great decision.

Since launching in 2020, Oshi has raised nearly $120M (half from its just-closed $60M Series C) to help the ~70M Americans suffering from GI conditions control their symptoms while decreasing their total cost of care.

  • It accomplishes this by supporting patients with a gastroenterologist-led care team of advanced practice providers, dietitians, behavioral health specialists, and care coordinators.
  • These multidisciplinary teams collaborate with local PCPs and GI clinics to treat conditions ranging from acid reflux to Crohn’s Disease, enabling a high-touch point approach that would be difficult to achieve without the extra bandwidth.

The fact that Oshi is already available in all 50 states and to 40M+ people as an in-network benefit is a testament to both the size of the market as well as its model, which differentiates itself with its deep behavioral health integration.

  • Many symptoms can be caused by the connection between the patient’s gut and brain, with trauma often marking the onset of new GI issues, and can be corrected through CBT or gut-directed hypnotherapy. Oshi has the research to back that up.

A study done in conjunction with a large national health plan found that Oshi generated $10,292 per patient in avoidable testing, procedures, and ED visits, with 92% of patients reporting symptom improvement within six months.

  • Publishing this data was instrumental to Oshi securing health plan coverage, which made it easier for the employers they work with to integrate that care into their benefits offerings, and in turn helped drive awareness among employees with access to the service.

Although payors and employers continue to shift away from specialty point solutions toward broader digital health platforms, the GI market is large enough to justify standalone companies like we see in cardiology or MSK.

The Takeaway

Oshi has quickly emerged as a leader in the virtual GI space, and it’s now armed with $60M to push its lead even further by expanding its payor coverage, provider group partnerships, and employer programs – not to mention a push into Medicare slated for 2025.

Maven Clinic, Suki, Glooko Start Q4 in Style

Posted on by Jason Barry

It isn’t every week we see digital health startups score a hat trick of massive funding rounds – let alone one that rakes in a combined $295M – but Maven Clinic, Suki, and Glooko clearly came to play.

Maven Clinic kicked off the action by closing $125M of Series F funding and vaulting its valuation to $1.7B. The women’s and family health startup also gave us a behind-the-scenes peek at its 10-year roadmap:

  • Fertility Benefits – Maven’s fertility benefits administration product has brought millions of lives under management since launching last year, and it’s leaning in on forming more clinic partnerships to create a seamless experience between Maven’s virtual care model, financial platform, and in-person treatments. 
  • VBC – The maternity program that serves as the bedrock of Maven’s platform is moving past “phase one” by using real-time data to engage members with a broader ecosystem of services, enabling Maven to take on full-risk and align incentives with outcomes.
  • Engagement – Soon-to-be-announced AI capabilities will bolster Maven’s engagement engine with more insights into fertility, maternity, and family building, as well as often-overlooked areas like return-to-work, parenting, and menopause.

Next up we saw ambient AI startup Suki land $70M of Series D financing on the heels of  adding over a dozen new health systems in the past few months.

  • The release highlighted an expanded partnership with MedStar Health that’ll make Suki Assistant available to thousands of clinicians across specialties including primary care, cardiology, and gastroenterology.
  • Suki also teased plans to expand beyond its existing Suki Assistant and Suki Platform offerings, although details were sparse on what that might entail.

Glooko rounded out last week’s top scorers with a $100M Series F round and the appointment of a new CEO to guide the digital diabetes developer through its next chapter.

  • Freshly appointed chief Mike Alvarez will accelerate the global expansion of Glooko’s solution suite that helps diabetics take control of their condition and equips care teams with a unified platform for managing devices, data, and engagement.

The Takeaway

Digital health startups are off to a hot start in Q4, and Maven Clinic, Suki, and Glooko are the ones cranking up the heat. All signs are pointing to more late-stage mega-rounds as companies look to shore up their balance sheets and bridge the gap to a quickly thawing IPO market, unless of course they’re already eager to diveright in.

Huma Acquires eConsult, Launches Huma Workspace for Health Systems

Posted on by Jason Barry

Huma isn’t wasting any time putting its $60M of Series D funding to work, acquiring digital triage and consultation platform eConsult less than a few months after closing the round.

The move aligns with Huma’s vision of becoming the “Shopify for Digital Health” by equipping provider orgs and pharma companies with modular platforms / software development kits for a wide range of use cases.

  • The Huma Cloud Platform is a no-code app builder that enables 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.

eConsult’s intelligent triage platform adds an entrypoint to Huma’s ecosystem by guiding patients through a series of medical questions before determining an appropriate pathway.

  • From there, eConsult gives physicians a summary of any flags or considerations to review, then connects them to a “comprehensive array of digital health solutions” such as appointment booking, screening tools, or virtual consults.

Those capabilities strengthen the foundation of Huma Workspace for Health Systems, which was announced alongside the acquisition to provide seamless access to Huma’s library of pre-built modules and solution marketplace. Those support:

  • Check-in and Triage: Captures patient symptoms and clinical history to prioritize patients with immediate needs and optimize intake.
  • Communication Suite: Equips clinicians with tools to manage patients remotely, such as a full messaging suite, video, scheduling, and EHR integration.
  • Remote Patient Monitoring: Allows hospitals to quickly scale applications for diabetes, hypertension, CKD, and other conditions.
  • Proactive Engagement: Automates direct patient communication for screening, education, and engagement campaigns across entire populations.

Put it all together, and Huma is assembling the pieces to an end-to-end platform for delivering virtual care at scale, with over 3,000 hospitals and clinics already using it to power projects for nearly two million active users.

The Takeaway

End-to-end digital health platforms aren’t built in a day, and the acquisition of eConsult confirms that Huma isn’t afraid of using M&A to speed up the process. Huma is full-speed-ahead with adding new capabilities and growing its footprint, so it wouldn’t be surprising if more acquisitions were right around the corner.

Providence Spin-Out Praia Brings Flywheels to Healthcare

Posted on by Jason Barry

The ink is officially dry on Providence-spinout Praia Health’s $20M Series A fundraise, and we couldn’t have asked for a better frame up of the startup’s potential impact than SignalFire’s investment memo on why it co-led the round.

Praia Health is helping hospitals avoid the commoditized care caravan by enabling the creation of consumer profiles that extend beyond the medical record, allowing them to recreate the “digital flywheels” enjoyed by other industries.

  • These flywheels have been hindered by healthcare’s reliance on the legacy architectures and closed-system constraints of the EHR, which fails to incorporate the behaviors happening outside of medical encounters that drive a lion’s share of health outcomes. 

Here’s how Praia enters the picture:

  • The first step is a “lift and shift” to Praia’s Secure Patient Identity Service that enables a single sign-on for all of a system’s digital experiences (branded apps, portals, etc.).
  • Praia’s PersonStore then marries those patient profiles with consumer data, synchronizing the EHR to connect-the-dots between outside data and outcomes. 
  • The SPI and PersonStore capabilities lay the groundwork to link Praia’s growing partner ecosystem into ecommerce-like experiences that emphasize patient satisfaction and loyalty – critical priorities for C-suites grappling with margin pressure and patient attrition.

SignalFire’s history on the patient engagement evolution highlights the leap in Praia’s approach:

  • Gen 1: Unidirectional patient notifications primarily focused on scheduling marked the first step in delivering healthcare info through more accessible channels like SMS.
  • Gen 2: Bidirectional communication transformed medical interactions by giving patients the ability to respond to provider messages.
  • Gen 3: Omnichannel engagement with tech-enabled interactions and seamless integrations let patients perform tasks like rescheduling appointments with options pulled from the provider’s practice management software.
  • Gen 4: Praia Health’s breakthrough – an AI-powered patient engagement suite and automated actions driven by deep EHR integration to connect all data sources and orchestrate the end-to-end patient experience.

The Takeaway

The healthcare industry is at a well-traveled crossroads, facing the same challenges as the banking sector encountered with the rise of online services. Just as fintech companies disrupted banking with fine tuned experiences and lower costs, digital health startups are going after health systems’ lowest hanging service lines with the same promises. Praia gives providers a way to fight back with the tried-and-true digital flywheels that have so-far been out of reach.

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.

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