The folks at Collaborative Fund certainly like a challenge.
Oh, and they decided to raise their sixth flagship fund at a time when limited partners have grown more miserly.
Collaborative recently raised $125 million for its sixth flagship fund, the firm exclusively told TechCrunch, completing the process in just over 90 days.
“This fundraising environment is tougher than any I’ve seen since starting the firm well over a decade ago,” founder and managing partner Craig Shapiro told TechCrunch.
Part of that could be the fact that Collaborative has recently returned capital to its LPs, Shapiro said.
Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal.
Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior’s $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, an accelerator that helped the company launch in the summer of 2022, also participated in the Series A financing.
The company has built an LLM-powered co-pilot that helps nurses and doctors save hours on gathering medical documentation required by insurance.
While Anterior’s initial offering is in prior authorization automation, the company eventually plans to expand into other medical administrative functions.
Makhzoimi also backed Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup that launched this year with $1 billion in funding.
As I wrote recently, generative AI models are increasingly being brought to healthcare settings — in some cases prematurely, perhaps.
Hugging Face, the AI startup, proposes a solution in a newly released benchmark test called Open Medical-LLM.
Hugging Face is positioning the benchmark as a “robust assessment” of healthcare-bound generative AI models.
It’s telling that, of the 139 AI-related medical devices the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved to date, none use generative AI.
But Open Medical-LLM — and no other benchmark for that matter — is a substitute for carefully thought-out real-world testing.
When Alex Katz founded Two Chairs in 2017, he firmly believed that in-person therapy is the most effective for behavioral health.
On Tuesday, the company announced a $72 million Series C equity and debt financing led by Amplo and Fifth Down Capital, bringing Two Chairs total funding to $103 million.
Amplo also led the company’s $22.5 million Series B in August 2019.
Two Chairs is one of the latest therapy startups to raise substantial funding rounds.
Last week, Grow Therapy, a three-sided mental health platform for therapists, payers and patients, raised an $88 million Series C round led by Sequoia.
Prominent generative AI startups in healthcare include Ambience Healthcare, which is developing a generative AI app for clinicians; Nabla, an ambient AI assistant for practitioners; and Abridge, which creates analytics tools for medical documentation.
The broad enthusiasm for generative AI is reflected in the investments in generative AI efforts targeting healthcare.
Collectively, generative AI in healthcare startups have raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital to date, and the vast majority of health investors say that generative AI has significantly influenced their investment strategies.
But both professionals and patients are mixed as to whether healthcare-focused generative AI is ready for prime time.
Generative AI might not be what people wantIn a recent Deloitte survey, only about half (53%) of U.S. consumers said that they thought generative AI could improve healthcare — for example, by making it more accessible or shortening appointment wait times.
Hinge Health, a nine-year-old company that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, cut approximately 10% of its workforce on Thursday, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
The company said people who were laid off worked across various functions; according to employees posting on LinkedIn, some were engineers.
Before the layoffs, Hinge had more than 1,700 employees, according to a LinkedIn estimate.
The company has raised a total of $828 million, according to PitchBook data.
The company’s main competitor is General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures-backed Sword Health, which was last valued at $2 billion in November 2021.
Checkr, a 10-year-old startup that offers employee background checks and was last valued at $5 billion in April 2022, has laid off 382 employees as companies are not significantly hiring talent.
TechCrunch exclusively learned that Checkr conducted the layoffs across all departments and different levels on Tuesday.
“In response to economic conditions that have impacted companies’ hiring, we made the difficult and painful decision to reduce the size of our team.
This will allow us to operate more efficiently and ensure the long-term health of our business,” a Checkr spokesperson said in the statement.
The job cuts — which affected 32% of the company’s workforce — came nearly two years after Checkr announced the acquisition of Inflection, the startup behind GoodHire, a background-checking platform for small- and mid-sized businesses.
Most recently, the company expanded its offer its virtual therapy sessions to services for adolescents across its footprint.
The virtual clinic’s medication-assisted treatment for substance use disorders is available across 50 states for adults and teens.
Since its Series B, Pelago has experienced an impressive 11x revenue surge and claims to have 100% client retention.
Pelago members have regular sessions with virtual care teams in the app, consisting of health coaches or licensed drug and alcohol counselors.
In addition to its virtual therapy interface, the company is investing in bringing more tech to bear on its business.
Century Health is a new startup also getting in on the action.
“One of the biggest issues around innovation for new treatments is efficient access to good patient data.
That data sat around for decades because it takes manual effort to normalize and extract insight from it.”That’s when he teamed up with friend Sanjay Hariharan, a data scientist and applied AI engineer, to form Century Health.
For us, that also means as affordably as possible with access to good real-world data.”Now with $2 million pre-seed funding, Century Health will run three to five pilots over the next several months.
In addition to the validated technology, another milestone will be to secure early revenue from the pilots, which Century Health can leverage to go after another round of venture capital.
For his next trick the Paris-based robotics entrepreneur is fronting work on a far lighter kind of wearable: An arm-worn patch for monitoring chronic kidney disease (CKD).
At the same time rising costs of healthcare provision has increased pressure on services to find smarter ways to tackle expensive issues like chronic disease management, without compromising quality of service.
Biowearables offer a potential route to help square this circle for a range of chronic health conditions.
At the same time Boulanger’s co-founder, Chashchina, was dealing with a chronic health condition.
Metyos cites statistics which suggest there are more than 800 million CKD patients globally.
