Maven Clinic, Suki, Glooko Start Q4 in Style

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.

Suki Raises $55M to Bring Voice to Visits

Although some physicians might love the time-consuming administrative tasks that help make a successful patient visit, Suki recently raised a $55M Series C round to help develop AI-enabled voice tools for those that don’t.

As of the latest funding, the company has raised a total of $95M to support the development of Suki Assistant, its voice-first digital assistant, and Suki Speech Service, its platform designed to improve the accuracy and experience of voice solutions.

  • Suki uses natural language processing to create patient notes and streamline administrative tasks, such as retrieving information from the EHR or ICD-10 coding. 
  • The digital assistant supports doctors “in any clinical setting, as well as any specialty,”  and can be configured with personalized commands to adapt to unique workflows.
  • Early research shows that the assistant lowers average time per note by 76%, while decreasing claim denials by 19% through the creation of detailed documentation.
  • Voice is quickly entering the healthcare spotlight, with Notable raising a $100M Series B in September and Microsoft acquiring Nuance for nearly $20B earlier this year.

The Takeaway

The accuracy of voice recognition has crossed a threshold that allows it to be effective in a growing number of consumer products, as well as in healthcare. These tools can now understand a speaker’s intent regardless of most accents or phrasing, leading to wider adoption within previously difficult use cases.

In a roundabout way, Suki is taking a tech-heavy approach to making technology less visible, removing it from between the doctor and the patient so that more attention can be given to providing clinical care. Taking advantage of voice is a natural way to accomplish this, giving Suki a good shot at reducing burnout by allowing more time for physicians to actually practice medicine.

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