Oura VP Jason Oberfest

Startups

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

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.

A Look Under the Hood at Nabla

Nabla CEO Alex Lebrun put on a masterclass in transparency with his recent LinkedIn post exploring how Nabla leverages – and improves upon – OpenAI’s Whisper speech-to-text engine. The post dives into why Nabla annotated a unique dataset of over 7,000 hours of medical encounter audio to train its own model, and the improvements that were specifically developed to suppress hallucinations.

A First Principles Approach to Responsible AI

Playback Health has over 15 years of experience breaking down complicated technology problems into basic elements then reassembling new solutions from the ground up, and just published a short-and-sweet guide to help others take a “first principles approach” to responsible AI.

Top Systems Scale Primary Care With K Health

Leading health systems are turning to K Health’s AI-driven primary care solution to give their patients access to high-quality care with wait times measured in hours, not months. Find out why K Health is the only clinical AI company partnering with top systems to scale fully integrated primary care experiences.

The Wire

• Forward Founder’s Next Venture: It’s only been a week since doc-in-a-box startup Forward shuttered operations, yet Business Insider already got the scoop on former CEO Adrian Aoun’s next venture. Although specifics on the new company remain to be seen, apparently Aoun received a call from one of Forward’s biggest investors on the same day the company closed with a proposition to back his next startup. It’s shocking how investors aren’t deterred by the fact that the CarePod operator just cooked half a billion dollars, but this episode of the More or Less Podcast shared a valuable glimpse into Forward’s winddown directly from the CEO himself.

• Jimini Launches Sage: Jimini Health launched with $8M in pre-seed funding to transform teletherapy sessions using an AI assistant named Sage, which it hopes will reduce how often patients have to see their therapists. Patients can talk with Sage to receive responses about their mental health that are informed by the information their therapist shared during actual sessions. Sage also provides prompts to help patients reflect on their sessions and set priorities for their next appointment.

• GPT for Study Selection: The NIH-developed an AI algorithm to help speed up the process of matching potential volunteers to relevant clinical trials listed on ClinicalTrials.gov. A Nature study found that the new TrialGPT algorithm successfully assessed over 1,000 patient-criterion pairs with nearly the same accuracy as clinicians, and that clinicians using the AI to assist their process spent 40% less time screening patients while maintaining the same level of accuracy.

• Thrive AI Health Leak: TechCrunch got its hands on a leaked demo video of Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington’s Thrive AI Health assistant, and “bare-bones” is apparently one of the nicer ways the author could have described it. Unfortunately the article doesn’t include the actual video – which has since been removed from Thrive AI’s website after a wave of scrutiny across social media – but the screenshots are still up in the article. We’ve honestly seen worse.

• Array Partners With KeyCare: Array Behavioral Care and KeyCare joined forces to eliminate system-wide gaps in mental health treatment. By working within KeyCare’s Epic-based platform, Array’s tele-behavioral health providers can seamlessly coordinate care across hospital, community/outpatient, and home settings. As a result, providers can share data and get a unified view of each patient’s physical and mental health to enhance treatment pathways and ensure comprehensive care. 

• WellSky’s SkySense Suite: WellSky unveiled its SkySense suite of AI-powered tools designed to increase clinician efficiency by automating forms and reducing documentation time. The SkySense suite includes three EHR-integrated solutions: WellSky Extract (pulls key information from documents), WellSky Scribe (provides ambient transcription of patient visits into documentation), and WellSky Summarize (AI-generated medical record summaries). 

• Beta Bionics Bolsters Funding: Diabetes management platform Beta Bionics closed a $60M Series E round to support the commercialization of its iLet Bionic Pancreas and accelerate its product pipeline. The iLet Bionic Pancreas is an autonomous insulin delivery system that streamlines diabetes management by removing the need to calculate insulin corrections throughout the day, determining 100% of the doses and continuously adjusting to the user.

• Surveying AI Excitement: A Define Ventures survey of more than 60 payor and provider execs found that over half (58%) are confident about AI’s immediate ability to enhance the patient and clinician experience, but are surprisingly less bullish on AI’s ability to reduce healthcare costs (33%). Almost three-fourths (73%) said their organizations have already set up an AI governance structure, with primary focus areas including identifying and prioritizing use cases (91%), establishing ethics and safety guidelines (87%), and setting data policies (84%).

• RhythmX Interview: A Fierce interview with Rhythmx AI’s CEO did a nice job framing up how Presbyterian Healthcare Services is using GenAI to offload administrative tasks from its primary care physicians. Rhythmx’s platform ingests EHR and payor data to produce advanced patient risk stratification, help identify appropriate next steps, and even route patients to necessary care. The interview succeeds in making Rhythmx sound “more upstream and proactive than a typical documentation player.”

• CareMessage Debuts Assistant: CareMessage launched an AI Assistant tailor-made for helping safety-net organizations parse patient responses into structured data and surface insights into their underlying needs, such as food insecurity or transportation barriers. By overcoming common barriers to attending visits that disproportionately affect low socioeconomic populations, CareMessage expects AI Assistant to save its customers up to $5M annually in recaptured appointments.

Lift MA Plan Performance by Impacting SDoH

Social factors and non-medical issues strongly influence health outcomes, and addressing these contributing determinants of health can not only improve the lives of patients, but also enhance Medicare Advantage plan success. Learn how Clear Arch Health’s remote monitoring services are helping MA plans deliver cost-effective care while enabling more seniors to age independently.

Level Up With BPM Pro 2

Withings Health Solutions is leveling up remote monitoring programs with BPM Pro 2 – the first cellular blood pressure monitor to collect Patient Insights and streamline provider operations. Discover how BPM Pro 2 is giving time back to care teams by delivering the context behind each measurement.

The State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing

We’re on the brink of a new era in healthcare. From AI-enabled chatbots to GenAI, Medallion’s latest report sheds light on how healthcare organizations are prioritizing automation, actively shaping their future with it, and hoping it can live up to its promise. Get the full report here.

The Industry Wire

1. Chronic pain affects 24.3% of U.S. adults.
2. Eli Lilly follows J&J with federal 340B rebate lawsuit
3. 4M people would lose coverage if ACA subsidies expire.
4. Geisinger performs shoulder replacement with a lifetime guarantee.
5. RFK Jr. may seek to rescind AMA’s ability to create billing codes.
6. Indiana residents and feds fight monopolizing hospital merger.
7. CommonSpirit taps into University of Utah Health providers.
8. WHO’s primary care digital transformation handbook.
9. Steward bankruptcy leads to CareMax bankruptcy.
10. RFK Jr. weighs changes on Medicare reimbursements.