CB Insights released its annual Digital Health 150 rankings of the most promising private digital health startups, and it was interesting to see how dramatically the landscape evolved over the past year.
Methodology (maybe more of a Disclaimer): The startups that made the final cut were selected from a pool of 13k applicants based on “proprietary Mosaic scores,” company business models, funding, investor profiles, competitive positioning, tech novelty, and plenty of other metrics. Getting your company to purchase CB Insights’ data products wasn’t listed as one of them, although it probably wouldn’t hurt your chances.
With that out of the way, let’s dive into some of the biggest trends that emerged in the Digital Health 150 pictured above (here’s a high-res version).
- Early-stage innovation: This year’s Digital Health 150 included a huge share of high flying up-and-comers, with nearly half of the list at Series A or earlier in their growth. These players included Equum Medical (acute care telehealth), Vori Health (hybrid MSK treatment), Playback Health (mixed media patient-provider communications), and Homeward (rural healthcare provider).
- Diagnostics focus: The screening, monitoring, & diagnostics category led with 29 startups (25%), including Babyscripts (virtual maternity care), Ixlayer (precision health testing), and Enlitic (medical imaging AI). That category was followed by interoperability & data (12%), virtual care (11%), and patient engagement (11%). These categories clearly have a ton of momentum, but growing success leads to growing saturation.
- Mental health momentum: Although the treatment indications took some time to sort out manually, we counted 24 startups building mental health solutions, a big step up from the 10 that were included last year. It would have been more surprising if it were any other area.
- Few repeat showings: Around 90% of this year’s cohort wasn’t on last year’s list, which was apparently due to record M&A activity and public exits in 2021. Repeat showings included names that are tough to argue with like Xealth, Redox, and Maven Clinic.
- Top investors: General Catalyst was the most active investor in this year’s cohort, backing 13 of the companies since 2017 (Ex. Equip, Casana, SWORD Health). Insight Partners was a close second (10), followed by 7wire (6), and Plug and Play (6).
The Takeaway
Lists like these usually get some pushback because of the methodology or glaring company exclusions, but this year’s Digital Health 150 cohort feels pretty well aligned with the high momentum names that keep popping up in our own coverage. For what it’s worth, here were some of social media’s most commonly mentioned exclusions: Ada Health, Awell, Cityblock, Innovaccer, Memora, Ribbon, Turquoise, TytoCare, and Zus.
