Spring is finally here, and Rock Health’s Q1 funding recap shows that the investing landscape is definitely looking greener than last year.
Digital health startups raised $4B on the dot. That’s a whole billion higher than Q1 2025, although the gains were far from evenly distributed.
Here’s Q1 2026 by the numbers:
- Digital health funding totaled $4B across 110 rounds (vs. $3B and 122 rounds last year).
- Average round size climbed to $36.7M (highest since Q4 2021).
- Rock Health counted 12 mega-rounds over $100M.
That last bullet defined the quarter. A dozen companies accounted for 59% of all capital deployed in Q1, one of the highest concentrations Rock Health has ever seen.
- Round sizes have consistently increased every quarter since 2024, and there haven’t been this many nine-figure checks in a quarter since the pandemic peak in 2022.
- Whoop landed $575M at a $10B valuation, Verily raised $300M as it steps out from under Alphabet’s umbrella, and OpenEvidence’s fundraising blitz added another $250M.
The check sizes only tell half the story. One of the reasons why startups are raising bigger late-stage rounds is because they’re waiting longer to go public.
- Hinge and Omada broke the ice, but all it took was a little “geopolitical uncertainty” to spook investors and close the IPO window right behind them.
- If the rest of 2026 pans out like the first quarter, we’d see close to 50 mega-rounds, almost double last year’s count.
AI is now the operating environment. The tech has become so ubiquitous that Rock Health said it will no longer be using “AI-enabled startups” as a distinct category in its funding reports.
- The broader market remains bullish on the value of AI, but if everyone has it then it stops being a differentiator.
- The AI startups successfully raising are the ones moving earliest into complex use cases, like Doctronic’s prescribing pilot in Utah or Qualified Health’s governance platform for health systems.
The Takeaway
Q1 mostly brought more of the same. Investors are active but selective, and the chasm between the Davids and Goliaths isn’t getting any smaller. AI is helping startups move faster than ever, but the rest of the year should help clarify whose momentum is actually durable.
