What You Should Know: 

• Bold, a Los Angeles-based healthy aging platform raises $17M in Series A funding led by Rethink Impact, with participation from Samsung Next and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, Khosla Ventures, GingerBread Capital, and Primetime Partners. The latest funding, bringing its total amount raised to $27M. 
• The company plans to utilize the capital to support Bold’s continued expansion with national and regional Medicare plans and provider groups, and accelerate the growth of its clinical exercise offerings to support the diverse physical and mental health needs of older adults.

Reduce falls, increase activity, improve satisfaction

1 in 3 adults over 65 falls every year. Founded in 2020, Bold provides each member with a personalized, evidence-based exercise program in order to prevent falls, reduce musculoskeletal pain and disability, and increase physical activity levels. The company partners with innovative Medicare plans and providers to support underserved members, many of whom suffer from chronic conditions, mobility issues, and pain. Utilizing dynamic adjustments and sophisticated behavioral science, Bold’s platform engages members continuously as they build sustainable habits that provide lasting impact.

Bold’s Program Peer-Reviewed Research

In peer-reviewed research, Bold’s programs have demonstrated a 46% reduction in falls, which impact more than one in four Americans over the age of 65 each year and result in $50 billion in costs, more than Medicare’s annual spend on cancer. With less than 15 percent of older adults in the U.S. meeting recommended physical activity guidelines, evidence is widespread that Bold’s pioneering, movement-as-medicine approach can provide durable, cost-effective healthspan improvements for older adults. According to the CDC, 4 out of 5 of the most costly chronic conditions among adults 50 years or older can be prevented or managed with physical activity, and Bold will use this funding to accelerate its impact on these costly conditions within its healthy aging platform.

“Millions of older adults spend years in poor and declining health brought on by falls, pain, and other chronic conditions, representing a growing disconnect between quality of life and overall longevity,” said Amanda Rees, Co-founder and CEO of Bold. “Bold was designed to increase healthspan for older adults, offering accessible, easy-to-follow programs that improve strength, reduce falls, and promote lifelong well-being.”

What You Should Know:

– Ibex Medical Analytics (Ibex), a provider of AI-powered cancer diagnostics raises $55M in Series C financing round led by 83North.

– The round also included participation from Sienna Venture Capital and existing investors in the company, Octopus Ventures, aMoon, Planven Entrepreneur Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital. The financing brings total funding to over $100M since Ibex’s inception in 2016.          

AI-Powered Cancer Diagnostics

Ibex is transforming cancer diagnostics with AI-powered solutions that help pathologists improve the quality of diagnosis and support laboratories with enhanced efficiency and better turnaround times. Cancer incidence is rising around the world while its diagnosis becomes more complex and nuanced, causing heavy workloads for pathologists and laboratories. The increasing demand is compounded by a global shortage of pathologists who still rely heavily on manual work and solely on visual analysis of biopsies. Ibex’s Galen platform helps overcome these challenges with AI-powered workflows and decision support tools that pathologists use in their everyday practice.

“Ibex is leading the market in live customer deployments as we remain steadfast in our mission of providing every patient with a timely, accurate and personalized cancer diagnosis,” said Joseph Mossel, Co-Founder and CEO of Ibex. “This latest financing round will enable us to take major steps toward reaching our goal. We will be using the funds to expand our footprint in the United States to meet the increasing demand for AI-powered diagnostic solutions, and to accelerate the growth of our product portfolio to create more tools for pathologists and labs as they digitally transform their practices. This financing round highlights our strong commercial momentum and our tenacity in pursuing the opportunities that lie ahead.”

What You Should Know:

•  Pitango HealthTech, Pitango VC’s dedicated healthcare fund, today announced the launch of its second dedicated healthcare fund, Pitango HealthTech II.
• Pitango HealthTech II had its first closing of the new $175M fund dedicated to investing in entrepreneurs leveraging data science, AI, medical devices and novel biology at the forefront of the transformation of healthcare.

AI-Driven Technologies and Medical Devices at the Forefront of Healthcare

The $9 Trillion global healthcare market is undergoing dramatic shifts, and Israeli entrepreneurs are building companies that are spearheading this transition. Pitango HealthTech II invests in healthcare innovation, including the decentralization of healthcare, personalized medicine,  medical devices and diagnostics, as well as artificial intelligence, software and data infrastructure. 

“Despite the global and local macroeconomic challenges, the healthcare sector continues to show resilience and growth. Recent events such as the pandemic, decentralization of healthcare, and value-based care, have resulted in unprecedented openness towards the adoption of new technologies,” said Ittai Harel, Managing Partner at Pitango HealthTech. “We’re launching this new fund to continue to back entrepreneurs and invest in companies that are revolutionizing the healthcare industry. Pitango believes that the most promising healthcare innovations occur at the convergence of life science and medical technologies with data science and AI, coupled with innovative services. This revolution is at its early onset, and is yet to accelerate.” 

Pitango HealthTech invests in companies from seed to commercial stage. The fund’s investment strategy is focused on all segments of healthcare and life sciences. Previous investments include value-driving companies such as Protai, Laguna Health, Vertos, Visby, Clew and Magenta. The first investments of the newest fund are QuantHealth.ai, an AI company focused on clinical trial simulations to accelerate and de-risk drug development, and Nevia Bio, a FemTech company developing an AI-based biomarker platform for early detection of women’s health diseases. 

What You Should Know:

– Concord Health Partners, a healthcare-focused investment firm, announced their investment in NeuroFlow, the market-leading behavioral health SaaS platform. 

– NeuroFlow’s platform combines AI-driven analytics, care collaboration enablement, and enterprise consumer-grade activation to reduce the risks of identifying, managing, and monitoring complex behavioral health and substance use populations.

– Concord’s investment will provide NeuroFlow with capital to continue to grow the company to match the increase in demand for its solutions from hospitals and health systems, as well as within the complex payor and government agency segments.

What You Should Know: 

– Integral, an innovator in safeguarding privacy and maximizing data quality raises $6.9M in seed funding to protect sensitive health data and provide automated expert certification software that enables health and life sciences companies access to compliant, rich, de-identified data in hours, rather than months. 

– The seed round was led by Haystack, The General Partnership, and Virtue Ventures, with additional support from Also Capital, Array Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, LiveRamp Ventures, and Venrex.

Real-time Compliance for Life Sciences

Founded in 2022 by Shubh Sinha, CEO and John Kuhn, CTO, Integral streamlines dataset creation by automating the de-identification and compliance certification process. Personal and highly revealing healthcare data such as medical records, health histories, and genetic information, when combined with non-healthcare data such as social media activity, purchasing history, and location data, give researchers a deep, holistic understanding of a person’s health and lifestyle. While this combined data set enhances healthcare research and improves health outcomes, it can pose a significant threat to people’s privacy by potentially exposing sensitive information about individuals. Integral provides higher quality data and expert Certification-as-a-Service software, enabling customers to work with better data in nearly real-time.

“Combining healthcare and non-healthcare data can transform healthcare research and innovation. John and I asked why healthcare companies couldn’t buy and analyze data as quickly as retailers like Target or Walmart, and we’ve made that possible with Integral. We’ve proven and will continue to prove that speed, accuracy, and privacy can be treated equally, even when working with highly regulated data,” said Sinha. “We created Integral to achieve this goal, ensuring personal information is protected and people’s privacy rights are respected. By prioritizing privacy and building trust with the public, researchers can unlock more value from data, which leads to better clinical trials, medications, products, technologies, and more.”

What You Should Know: 

– QuantHealth, an Israeli-based AI-powered clinical trial design startup raises $15M in a Series A funding round co-led by Bertelsmann Investments and Pitango HealthTech, with participation from existing investors Shoni Top Ventures and Nina Capital. 

– The round also includes participation from previous investors including Boston Millennia Partners, Atooro Fund, and Renegade Ventures. The latest round of funding brings QuantHealth to $20M in funding to date.

Tackling Failed Clinical Trials

Today, over 90% of experimental therapies that reach human trials fail to make it to market. These trials fail primarily due to a lack of efficacy and safety. Some drugs shouldn’t go to trial, while many that do are suboptimally designed. All this is causing trials to become increasingly longer, more expensive, and less effective while patients aren’t getting the drugs they need. To address this challenge at its core, QuantHealth’s Clinical-Simulator predicts how each patient in a clinical trial will respond to treatment, allowing trial design teams to run thousands of protocol variations, and optimize the trial design for success. 

Based on its novel AI engine trained on a massive dataset of 350m patients and a rich biomedical knowledge graph, QuantHealth’s simulator can predict clinical trial results with 86% accuracy, allowing users to answer mission-critical questions around trial design, indication selection, asset evaluation, and more. The new funding will be used for commercial expansion, product development and expansion of the platform beyond clinical trials and into new use cases including regulatory support, and early R&D. 

“According to a recent Deloitte article, ROI on pharma R&D has steadily declined, reaching 1.2 percent in 2022, the lowest the industry has seen in decades,” said Orr Inbar, CEO and Co-Founder of QuantHealth. “This decline is happening at a time when the need for efficient drug development has never been greater. We firmly believe that deep AI solutions like ours will dramatically enhance the success of clinical trials, and pave the way towards better and cheaper therapies for patients around the world.”

What You Should Know:

TapestryHealth, a multi-specialty healthcare company, announced a $25M credit investment from Catalio Capital Management, a leading multi-strategy investment firm focused on healthcare and life sciences.

The senior secured term loan provides TapestryHealth an initial draw of $10M at close, with an additional $15M available at the company’s option. The credit facility matures in July 2027.

– TapestryHealth will use the funds to continue its expansion into new facilities and refinance existing corporate debt, maturing in March 2024.

TapestryHealth Background

TapestryHealth is a nationwide multi-specialty healthcare company that utilizes advanced radar technology and AI enabling clinicians to deliver both in-person and remote care to residents in skilled nursing facilities and other post-acute environments. Tapestry’s team of doctors, PAs, NPs and multiple medical specialists see patients at their bedsides, 24/7, making daily rounds, and building relationships with patients and their families. Tapestry’s artificial intelligence and machine learning protocols provide in-depth analysis at the patient, facility and national levels, which allows them to identify potentially at-risk patients before the onset of symptoms. 

What You Should Know:

Keona Health, a digital health company providing a healthcare CRM to simplify the complexities of patient access raises $7M led by Riverside Acceleration Capital (RAC), the growth capital arm of The Riverside Company.

The investment is an inflection point for Keona’s transformative CareDesk platform, a healthcare CRM specifically designed to simplify patient access, from scheduling to telephone triage.

Healthcare CRM: Harmonize Your Patient Access

Keona built Care Desk to remove complexity for healthcare staff and eliminate errors. CareDesk is an AI-powered platform that streamlines complex scheduling, telephone triage, and communication by guiding healthcare staff to the correct decisions in real-time. Rather than flip through paper manuals or click through disjointed software programs, staff members have everything they need at their fingertips to resolve every call quickly and confidently.

In addition to AI-guided call support, CareDesk offers digital self-scheduling, which has helped client organizations reduce call volume by 30 percent and boost online appointment bookings by as much as 40 percent. These same organizations have seen online scheduling conversion rates jump by 250 percent.

Expansion Plans

Keona Health will use its new funding to expand its position in the market, and to estab;osj CareDesk as a one-of-a-kind solution. In addition, the solution will help existing clients further optimize critical patient access processes and is eager to introduce CareDesk to new organizations.

What You Should Know:

– Gympass, a New York City-based corporate wellness platform raises $85M in a Series F funding round led by EQT Growth, with participation from Neuberger Berman at a valuation of $2.4B.

– In addition to the Series F funding led by EQT Growth, General Atlantic and Moore Strategic Ventures are also doubling down on their investments in Gympass by purchasing existing shares from earlier investors and current and former employees.

Largest Global Wellness Network for Employees

More than four out of five employees globally believe wellbeing is equally important to salary and 53%, of U.S. workers and 44% globally say they’re stressed on a daily basis. Today’s employees understand the value of wellbeing and are increasingly demanding it, which is putting pressure on employers to adapt. Founded in 2012,  Gympass offers the best global network of gyms, studios, classes, personal trainers, and wellness apps – all in one employee benefit. Companies can improve employee wellbeing and reduce healthcare costs by offering a benefit that is proven to drive higher employee participation. On average, Gympass more than doubles the number of employees engaged with wellness.

Global Wellness Network Footprint

The recent funding comes in a record year for Gympass, as it nearly doubled its customer base to more than 15,000 and surpassed two million employee subscribers across its network of more than 50,000 partners. Gympass has established new partnerships with leading wellness organizations, including 24 Hour Fitness, Barry’s Bootcamp, CorePower Yoga, Headspace, Lifetime, MyFitnessPal, Orangetheory Fitness, Sleep Cycle and Thrive Global. The company has also expanded into new, non-physical wellness categories including mental health, nutrition and financial wellness.

Regardless of the economic environment, organizations are recognizing that employee wellbeing doesn’t just positively impact retention, happiness and productivity–it also decreases healthcare costs. A Gympass study on the ROI of wellness programs discovered that physically active employees can reduce company healthcare costs by thirty-five percent after a twelve month period.

Expansion Plans

Gympass will use this new funding to continue to fuel its global expansion and product innovation, investing in its platform to enhance the user experience for both employers and employees. With an accessible, affordable, and flexible platform, employees are empowered to embark on their individual wellness journey with confidence, motivation, and a sense of community.

“Gympass is revolutionizing corporate wellness at a time where every company is making investments to drive efficient growth and reduce spending,” said Cesar Carvalho, CEO and Co-Founder of Gympass. “Organizations are shifting from reactive and traditional healthcare benefits that increase costs, to more holistic and preventative wellness benefits that reduce costs and improve employee wellbeing and productivity. Our accelerated growth and new round of funding reflects validation of our model, that Gympass is uniquely positioned in any economic environment as companies seek innovative partners to reduce healthcare costs and improve employee wellbeing.”

What You Should Know:

• Nursa, a nationwide platform that exists to put a nurse at the bedside of every patient in need, today announced the completion of its executive leadership team following an $80 million Series B funding raise led by Drive Capital and joined by existing partners Pelion and Kickstart. 
• With the addition of experienced Chief Product, Revenue and Technology Offers, Nursa is diversifying its expertise in order to further address the industry’s rising financial and nursing deficits.

Removing the Financial Strain and Operational Gaps of Traditional Staffing Methods One Nurse at a Time

The American Hospital Association called the hospital workforce shortage a “national emergency,” projecting the overall shortage of nurses to reach 1.1 million by the end of the year. Yet, it’s more than an operational and quality care problem; it’s also a massive financial concern. For every 1% decrease in turnover, the average hospital saves $262,300 annually. 

With federal incentives gone, solving nurse staffing shortages without additional financial loss is nearly impossible. The demand for care continues to grow while help at the bedside remains in short supply. System capacity is available, but inaccessible due to a mismatch of how resources are utilized. Nursa introduced its platform to enable hospitals, post-acute and long-term care facilities, and other community organizations to overcome the traditional staffing obstacles they face and find the best qualified nurse for each individual shift.

“Staffing firms – even ones with technology – are severely limited in their ability to find specialized nurses with experience and credentials to fit their patient needs,” shared Molly Bonakdarpour, general partner of Drive Capital. “Typically, these groups are limited to their existing networks, require contracts, and can’t staff for true per diem, increasing unnecessary costs for providers.”

Founded in 2019, Nursa has nearly 300 team members in its Salt Lake City headquarters and remote positions. Nursa is a locally driven, national platform, working with any organization that needs nurses to deliver the best patient care. Its platform was built to enable facilities to fill shifts quickly and easily with qualified nurses from their community, eliminating the requirements for bulk shifts and limited networks. To date, the company has secured more than $100 million in funding and is trusted by more than 1,300 facilities and 95,000 nurse users.

What You Should Know:

• Venteur, the digital health startup helping companies provide personalized health insurance options to their employees, has closed a seed funding round at $7.6 million. T
• The funding is led by GSR Ventures, with participation by Headwater VC, Revelry Venture Partners, Houghton Street Ventures, Plug and Play, Techstars, CRCM Ventures, and various strategic angels. The funding round closed in June.

Improving Employee Healthcare Decision-Making

Venteur enables businesses to empower their employees with control over their own health care by offering an Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA). Using Venteur’s platform, employers provide pre-tax dollars to buy health insurance. Employees receive a digital wallet and are invited to Venteur’s marketplace to shop for health insurance coverage. The marketplace is powered by proprietary AI decision support tools, which leverage 30 years of medical claims data to make personalized suggestions on the best health plans for each employee.  

“The ability to choose and keep our health insurance plan saved my dad’s life,” said Stacy Edgar, CEO and co-founder of Venteur. “Our goal is to bring this same health care decision-making control to all Americans. As we scale, the power of Venteur’s model is that it fundamentally re-aligns financial incentives, so that the whole health care system is aligned to serve consumers instead of intermediaries.” 

Led by sibling co-founders Stacy and Tim Edgar, Venteur is building the health insurance system of the future. The sibling team was motivated to start the company after growing up amid their parents’ 30-year struggle with health insurance costs. 

Venteur’s concierge-style ICHRA experience has been especially popular among larger employers in addition to small businesses. Early customers emphasize how the staggering cost-savings from the ICHRA model have enabled them to avoid layoffs and save jobs. Venteur estimates that the ICHRA model can save more than 5,000 employers – representing a total workforce of 20 million employees — at least $250 per employee per month while at the same time allowing them to provide more robust health insurance coverage to their workforce. 

What You Should Know: 

• The UnitedHealthcare Accelerator program, announced its fifth cohort of 10 digital health startups to participate in its four-month collaborative mentorship-driven program.
• Selected startups will receive guidance from UnitedHealthcare and Optum executive, fundraising support, and $50k in capital. 90% of this year’s companies were founded by women and / or people of color.

Here is a look at UnitedHealthcare Accelerator’s 2023 program class: 

1. Advocatia | Lake Bluff, IL
   Empowers healthcare organizations to engage and enroll their customers into benefits programs that reduce costs and improve health outcomes.
2. Affect Therapeutics | McLean, VA
   National, tech-enabled healthcare provider offering digital substance use disorder treatment.
3. Budgie Health | New York, NY
   Guides employees to the right health plan choice for them, leveraging real-time claims and financial analytics.
4. Isaac Health | New York, NY
   Scalable platform for population brain health and dementia management.
5. Laguna Health | New York, NY
   AI-powered contextual care management platform leveraging NLP to identify complex members’ individual life barriers and intervene automatically, at scale.
6. Marti Health | Atlanta, GA
   Committed to eliminating health disparities in special needs populations beginning with sickle cell disease.
7. Mighty Health | Los Angeles, CA
   The leading all-in-one chronic disease and weight management program for adults 50+.
8. Mirza | New York, NY
   Mirza works with employers to remove childcare as an obstacle for working parents by maximizing available government funds that help workers afford the care they need.
9. Spark | New York, NY
   Modern, tech-enabled Medicare brokerage partnering with local independent agents to advise Medicare beneficiaries on all their biggest healthcare decisions.
10. StationMD | Maplewood, NJ Telehealth company dedicated to serving individuals with intellectual and/or development disabilities (I/DD).

What You Should Know: 

• Today, Santa Cruz-based Capstan Medical, a developer of minimally invasive technology to address heart valve disease, announced $31.4M Series B investment round led by Eclipse.
• The Series B round included participation from  Intuitive Ventures and Puma Venture Capital, a new firm founded by Amit Hazan, a veteran Wall Street medical technology analyst, and Dr. Vipul Patel, a renowned robotic surgeon who has performed more robotic procedures than any other surgeon worldwide.   

New Standard of Heart Valve Treatment

Heart disease continues to be a leading cause of death in the U.S., claiming the lives of nearly 700,000 Americans each year. While many cardiovascular treatments have improved and become less invasive, traditional heart valve surgery remains highly invasive and is associated with lengthy recovery times.  Given the risks associated with open heart surgeries, many patients delay treatment, unwittingly increasing their health risks as well as the chances they may be too weak later on for open heart surgery. 

Founded in 2020, Capstan Medical is developing a suite of next-generation heart valve implants and a first of its kind catheter-based robotic delivery platform. By merging surgical robotics with catheter-based technology and next generation implants, the company has pioneered a patient-optimized approach to repair and replace heart valves. 

Less Invasive Alternative to Open Heart Surgery

Catheter-based treatment enables heart valve disease to be addressed with a small incision in the groin, without stopping the heart or opening the chest as required in open heart surgery. This technique speeds recovery from months to weeks and is likely tolerable for even the sickest of patients. Yet, there are no commercially available catheter-based mitral and tricuspid valve replacement options on the market today — less than 2% of the more than 5 million eligible patients are currently receiving treatment — leaving a rapidly growing patient population with few options to treat their valve disease before it is too late.

Capstan’s platform offers a significantly less invasive alternative to traditional open heart surgery while ensuring a precise and reliable placement of the heart valve implant. With these advancements, we may be able to provide patients a solution to their heart valve disease while significantly reducing recovery time and minimizing the risk of complications

What You Should Know: 

– CareQuest Innovation Partners, an organization that propels solutions that transform oral health, and MATTER, the premier healthcare incubator and innovation hub, announced five startups selected to participate in the second year of SMILE Health.

– Launched last year, SMILE Health is a program for identifying the solutions that make oral health more accessible, equitable, and integrated with overall health. Out of the 100 applications from early-stage startups across 11 countries and 24 U.S. states,  The second cohort includes wearables, AI tools, remote care, and early detection solutions.

2nd Cohort of Startups

Here is a look at the second cohort of startups: 

• Biolectrics: Biolectrics is commercializing OraFlow, a prescription oral care device that uses microcurrent stimulation to treat periodontitis, the sixth most prevalent health condition in the world. 
• Grin: Grin is reinventing oral care, for everyone. With Grin’s imaging and remote diagnostic solution, patients are connected to doctors remotely, bringing patient convenience, reduction in overhead and access to responsible care. 
• Kare Mobile: Kare Mobile helps dentists solve for increased productivity and enhanced patient experience. Operating as a mobile dental services organization, Kare Mobile is poised to close the access gap to oral healthcare through their proprietary single operator vans that they manufacture.
• Incisive: Incisive’s mission is to advance oral healthcare with innovative tools that will accelerate solutions to the global challenge of tooth decay. Incisive has developed BlueCheck, a highly sensitive, easy-to-use, objective measure of early stage caries to support the paradigm of minimally invasive care.
• Lura: Wearable blood/interstitial fluid-based monitors disrupted blood-based monitoring from ex vivo (outside the body) lab tests to continual in-body measurements. The same will be true with saliva. Lura Health is leading the way with a first-in-class salivary diagnostic in-mouth wearable for continual health and disease measurements. 

The program culminates on October 8, 2023 in a demo day as part of a dedicated systemic health program at HLTH.

What You Should Know:

• Reed Jobs – the son of Steve Jobs today announced the launch of his new venture capital (VC) investment fund, Yosemite, spun out from Emerson Collective Health with an oversubscribed $200M+ first close.
• Yosemite aims to meaningfully accelerate the technology, treatments, and standard of care that have the power to improve the health and lives of cancer patients.
• Composed of the Emerson Health team, Yosemite’s unique model provides no-strings-attached philanthropic grants to emerging researchers while investing in promising incubation and early-translation companies in therapeutics, diagnostics, and digital health.

Yosemite’s Global Network

Yosemite’s global network is designed to identify and fuel the most promising advances in treatment, technology, and standards of care. Strong relationships formed through grantmaking have often led academic researchers to return to the team with investment and company-creation opportunities. Yosemite brings an impressive track record of identifying emerging scientists and budding entrepreneurs on the cusp of scientific breakthroughs. Yosemite leaders have supported hundreds of researchers and invested in dozens of therapeutic and diagnostic companies across the U.S., Europe, and Israel to date.  

“We’re on a mission to lead the next chapter in the fight against cancer and forming our own standalone entity provides us the flexibility to best propel great ideas until they’re at scale,” said Reed Jobs of Yosemite. “We believe this first close demonstrates investor confidence in Yosemite’s strategy of building new companies, trust in our extensive grantee and institutional network, and value in our combined experience in shepherding new transformational cancer treatments.” 

Yosemite’s Limited Partners (LPs)

Yosemite’s Limited Partners include leading endowments, hospital systems and global family offices – such as The Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and John Doerr. Emerson Collective will be a Limited Partner in Yosemite Fund I. Going forward, Yosemite will manage the Emerson Health legacy portfolio (ECI Health Funds) as an investment advisor.