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Enhanced Goes Public, Fickle Investors, and the Toll of Roads
By Jason Barry
May 21, 2026
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Together with
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“Biggest moat for any company: go-to-market strategy. Owning a distribution channel equals a durable moat. Technology always converges. Everything else becomes commoditized.”
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Parakeet Health CEO Jung Park
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Today we’re diving into the latest digital health(ish) company to go public, Enhanced. You might have heard about the Enhanced Games promising to smash world records next week, but you probably missed the DTC health play propping up their valuation.
Cheers,
Jason
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The Enhanced Group just kept the digital health SPAC dream alive with its public market debut, but it took more than some juiced up athletes to justify its billion dollar valuation.
What if the Olympics allowed steroids? Next week’s Enhanced Games might be the answer.
Enhanced made a big splash when it first announced the events kicking off in Vegas this Sunday. It’s easy to see why:
- Athletes – 50
- Events – Swimming, Track, Weightlifting, Strongman
- World Record Bounty – $25,000,000
- Performance Enhancing Drugs – Go for it. There’s no testing.
That’ll definitely pull viewers. It’s also only a sliver of Enhanced’s actual gameplan.
- Every event is open to the public, at no cost, and so are the media rights. The entire spectacle is designed to get social media clips and as many eyeballs as possible.
- It might sound like Enhanced is building a new-gen marketing company, but it’s actually building a patient funnel that most telehealth companies could only dream of.
The real revenue comes after the records are broken. Earlier this month, Enhanced quietly added some sleek new buttons to its website. They all point to Live Enhanced.
- Live Enhanced is a direct-to-consumer telehealth platform that offers the full catalogue of 2026 trending medications. Peptites, GLP-1s, TRT, you name it.
- While other startups are busy peddling these with nothing but fake doctor Facebook accounts, Enhanced is doing it with genuine world records and famous athletes.
Telehealth makes more than TikTok. Enhanced has been putting the athletes that are participating in the games through a gauntlet of clinical studies using the drugs available on Live Enhanced.
- Every dose, every rep, and every rest is getting packaged into protocols for fans and patients alike.
- If an athlete breaks a record, they’ll probably have people lining up to try their protocol – even if Live Enhanced doesn’t mention a few extracurricular enhancements.
The Takeaway
Despite all the hype around the Games, Enhanced’s real product is the protocols – the rest is just lead gen. It’s the same blueprint as Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint, only on steroids;)
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- Fickle Investors: An independent study from Halle Tecco and two of her Columbia students (shoutout Kyra Gardner and Andy Wang) explored the current fundraising experience amidst the AI mania. Interviews with 24 digital health founders showed that investors only seem to be interested in AI, but what they’re asking for is a moving target. This pretty much sums it up – “The same investors told Eliana Berger two opposite things. At her seed: ‘AI agents are going to win the market. Why aren’t you building an agent?’ At her Series A, less than a year later: ‘The data platform approach is the way to go.’”
- Commure Nabs $70B: Commure hauled in another $70M from General Catalyst to “transform healthcare operations using AI”… and boost its valuation to a whopping $7B. For those keeping count, Commure raised $200M just last year from GC’s Customer Value Fund, a specialized investment vehicle that basically fronts the cost of sales and marketing in return for a slice of the new revenue. Commure’s been racking up a lengthy receipt of acquisitions as it pieces together its RCM and practice management platforms (most recently adding Augmedix and Memora), so it wouldn’t be too surprising to see the list get longer in the coming months.
- Maven Clinic Goes DTC: Women’s health unicorn Maven Clinic is getting into the direct-to-consumer game with a shiny new platform for on-demand services. Those include PPV specialty telehealth appointments, hormone therapy ($150 for two virtual visits plus medication costs), and of course, GLP-1s ($150 per month). The goal is reportedly to close gaps between the prescriptions and follow-ups that these therapies require, but at this point if you have a patient pipeline that could benefit from GLP-1s and you aren’t offering them, people might start to think you’re allergic to revenue.
- AI or Not: A recent study in Radiology found that many radiologists couldn’t tell AI-generated deepfake medical images from real ones, but it looks like the problem might also be the solution. A company called AI or Not ran the images from the study through its AI content detection algorithm and correctly identified 92% of the authentic images as real and missed none of the AI-generated images, achieving 100% accuracy in detecting synthetic content. AI or Not is positioning its tool as a way to reveal fraudulent claims and audit legal evidence, among other applications.
- Qualtrics Picks Up Press Ganey: Qualtrics completed its acquisition of fellow performance measurement giant Press Ganey Forsta for a cool $6.75B. Press Ganey has a network of over 41k healthcare orgs leveraging its experience data and benchmarking expertise, giving Qualtrics a massive surface area to start upselling its enterprise feedback and analytics suite. The acquisition sets the stage for a unified platform built around the patient, employee, and organizational experience, right in line with what Qualtrics laid out in its long-term strategy for moving deeper into regulated industries.
- Consumer Digital Health Trends: Reach3 Insights’ Digital Health Trends 2026 report found that health tech is now an integral part of most consumers’ daily lives, with the vast majority of Americans using health-related apps (71%) and devices (64%). The survey of 1,043 U.S. adults found that 88% want to see either more technology or the same amount involved in their health and wellness management over the next decade. Interestingly, future interest in telehealth cooled from 48% in 2024 to 41% in 2026, while excitement seems to be growing over smart glasses (16% to 21%) and smart rings (34% to 39%).
- Public Health Toll Roads: An open letter from the medical community on U.S. road deaths did a great job reframing the conversation around autonomous vehicles as a public health imperative. The 20 founding signatories included familiar faces like Dr. Eric Topol and Dr. Jon Slotkin, who co-signed the call to advance road safety through initiatives like standardizing federal reporting for autonomous vehicles and replacing unnecessary regulatory barriers with evidence-based frameworks. Over 36k Americans die on the road every year, so if you’re a clinician and the message resonates then you can add your signature at the bottom of the link.
- CGM + Nudges = Better HbA1c: A new study in JMIR produced promising results for patients with Type 2 diabetes by combining continuous glucose monitoring with behavior change support. Researchers randomized 100 T2D patients with HbA1c over 8% to receive either a CGM alongside Omada’s digital diabetes self-management program or usual care. At six months, the Omada + CGM group had dropped its average daily blood sugar by over 36 points and had spent 14.6% more time in target range.
- Funding Anomaly: Anomaly Insights raised $17M in Series A funding to fuel the development of its payor intelligence platform. The platform analyzes billions of healthcare transactions in real time to surface the payor behavior patterns, policy shifts, and adjudication deviations that determine what providers actually get for the care they deliver. The platform serves both revenue cycle and managed care functions, connecting day-to-day claims management with contract strategy so providers can “bring the receipts” to negotiations.
- But First, AI: A study presented at ESTRO 2026 showed that AI avatars might be an effective way to prep cancer patients for in-person radiation oncology consultations. Participants watched either a standardized educational video (n=506) or an AI avatar of a doctor explaining radiation treatment options with personalized scripts and illustrations to explain the concepts (n=958). As you might expect, patients who watched the AI avatar showed better understanding of their treatment plan and less stress prior to their consults. Hospital satisfaction scores also significantly improved.
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- Unlock Better Care With LOLA: Whether you’re looking to augment your team’s capacity or capabilities, Tucuvi’s clinically validated LOLA voice agent is purpose-built to make it happen – and has the success stories to prove it. Hear first-hand from Tucuvi’s customers how LOLA is empowering clinical teams to care for patients while maximizing ROI.
- A New Path for ACCESS Model Participants: Building your CMS ACCESS program? Withings was accepted into the inaugural cohort as both a participant and a device partner via the ACCESS Tools Directory. Bring the same FDA-cleared, cellular-enabled devices into your program, including BPM Pro 2, capturing clinical measurements and patient-reported outcomes at the point of reading, purpose-built for value-based cardio-kidney-metabolic care.
- Abridge Named #1 Best in KLAS – Again: KLAS just named Abridge #1 Best in KLAS for Ambient AI for the second year in a row. The recognition was based on direct customer feedback from the nation’s largest and most complex health systems, which gave Abridge the highest overall satisfaction score and A+ ratings across Culture, Loyalty, Relationship, and Value. Discover why Abridge is the market-leading AI platform for clinical conversations.
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