CB Insights unveiled its annual Digital Health 50 rankings of the most promising private digital health startups, and this year’s list certainly included many of the industry’s brightest stars.
Here’s the methodology / our disclaimer: The final cut was selected from a pool of 10k+ applicants based on “proprietary metrics” – Commercial Maturity and Mosaic Scores – along with data on partnerships, growth stats, and market adoption. (CB Insights is of course happy to share this data with its customers, but promises that being one of them doesn’t land you a spot on the list.)
With that out of the way, here’s a look at the Digital Health 50 (high-res version):
It’s tough to compare this list to last year’s given the ever-evolving categories and methodology, but CB Insights called out four key themes for the latest cohort:
- AI is becoming foundational infrastructure: 36 of the 50 companies are building AI products, ranging from operational automation high-flyers like Laguna to specialized healthcare LLMs like Hippocratic AI. No surprises here.
- Workflow efficiency is a key priority: 19 of the companies are streamlining administrative or clinical tasks, spanning document processing startups (Tennr) to ambient AI heavyweights (Abridge). These players seem like an obvious inclusion, but the same could be said last year when ambient AI was nowhere to be found.
- Diagnostic innovations dominate: 11 companies comprised this year’s largest category, developing next-gen diagnostics across imaging (Airs Medical), pathology (Proscia), and non-invasive diagnostics (Alimetry). Diagnostics was in a three-way tie with Clinical Intelligence and Virtual Care, although the categories have some hazy boundaries.
- More specialized platforms: Virtual and hybrid care representation doubled in this year’s cohort, reflecting the shift from general telemedicine toward condition-specific virtual models in areas like mental health (Talkiatry) and cancer care (Resilience).
The Takeaway
Lists like these never fail to get pushback because of the methodology or glaring exclusions, but this year’s cohort feels pretty well aligned with the high momentum names that keep popping up in our own coverage. Major congrats to the companies that were included.
