Despite having 47 IPOs, 28 M&As and 58 FDA-approved drugs under its belt, the 13-year-old multi-stage healthcare and life sciences firm took two years to raise its sixth fund.
On Wednesday, Foresite announced that it closed its sixth fund with $900 million.
Last summer, Foresite co-led a $115 million Series F into CG Oncology, a drug discovery company that had a successful IPO listing in January.
Foresite intends to back about 20 companies from its sixth fund, writing checks from a couple of million up to $75 million.
“Over a decade ago, we named the firm Foresite because we thought we had an idea of where healthcare was headed,” Tananbaum said.
Some of the files, which TechCrunch has seen, also contain contracts and agreements between Change Healthcare and its partners.
For Change Healthcare, there’s another complication: This is the second group to demand a ransom payment to prevent the release of stolen patient data in as many months.
UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of Change Healthcare, said there was no evidence of a new cyber incident.
What’s more likely is that a dispute between members and affiliates of the ransomware gang left the stolen data in limbo and Change Healthcare exposed to further extortion.
A Russia-based ransomware gang called ALPHV took credit for the Change Healthcare data theft.
Some of the files, which TechCrunch has seen, also contain contracts and agreements between Change Healthcare and its partners.
For Change Healthcare, there’s another complication: This is the second group to demand a ransom payment to prevent the release of stolen patient data in as many months.
UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of Change Healthcare, said there was no evidence of a new cyber incident.
What’s more likely is that a dispute between members and affiliates of the ransomware gang left the stolen data in limbo and Change Healthcare exposed to further extortion.
A Russia-based ransomware gang called ALPHV took credit for the Change Healthcare data theft.
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.
Thailand’s HD is building chatbots aimed at one such industry: healthcare.
The company started as a marketplace for third-party healthcare and surgery services, and sees a strong case for developing conversational AI for the healthcare customer journey.
Even though each product has a description on HD’s marketplace HD Mall, Ho says people still prefer to ask first.
M Venture Partners, FEBE Ventures, Partech Partners, Ratio Ventures, Orvel Ventures, and TA Ventures also participated in the round.
AI for Southeast AsiaHo says HD is working on building the “Sierra AI of the Southeast Asian healthcare industry.”Over five years, Ho and his team saw that the faster HD’s representatives responded to inquiries, the higher the conversion rate.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has transferred formal control of the eponymously firm’s named corporate venture fund to Ian Cathaway, OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch.
The Open AI Startup Fund, launched in 2021, was initially set up with Altman as its named controller.
Cathaway joined OpenAI in 2021 and played a key role managing the Startup Fund, leading investments in Ambience Healthcare, Cursor, Harvey, and Speak.
Last year, the fund had $175 million in commitments, and now holds $325 million in gross net asset value, according to an SEC filing.
The Startup Fund has backed at least 16 other startups, according to PitchBook data.
The State Department blamed the prolific ransomware group for targeting U.S. critical infrastructure, including healthcare services.
Last month, an affiliate group of the ALPHV/BlackCat gang took credit for a cyberattack and weeks-long outage at U.S. health tech giant Change Healthcare, which processes around one-in-three U.S. patient medical records.
The affiliate group went public after accusing the main ALPHV/BlackCat gang of swindling the contract hackers out of $22 million in ransom that Change Healthcare allegedly paid to prevent the mass leak of patient records.
Change Healthcare has said since that it ejected the hackers from its network and restored much of its systems.
U.S. health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of Change Healthcare, has not yet confirmed if any patient data was stolen.
Thankfully, there’s a new wave of startups entering the arena: UK startup Anima is a “care enablement” platform that operates almost like a combination of Slack, Salesforce and Figma, but for healthcare clinics and hospitals.
Anima, a graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch, launched in September 2022 and is now used in 150 NHS clinics in England.
The startup’s software lets clinic staff process and file healthcare documents, but adds in a higher degree of automation compared to legacy systems.
In the U.S., Memora Health has raised $80.5 million, and NexHealth, which is post-Series C, has raised $177.2 million to date.
I trained as a doctor at Cambridge, and I’m a self-taught software engineer who wrote a lot of the code for Anima.
Have you ever needed a copy of your medical imaging to take to your doctor or another healthcare provider and received the images on a CD?
Many radiologists still use this ancient format to transfer patients’ imaging files.
A startup called PocketHealth has built an medical image exchange platform to digitize the process for every patient and healthcare provider, making it more intelligent and personalized, no CDs involved.
PocketHealth isn’t the only company offering medical imaging sharing for patients in the MedTech space.
Ambra Health, based in New York, offers solutions for medical image sharing, and EnvoyAI, based in Massachusetts, develops a medical imaging AI marketplace.
If patient data has been stolen, the ramifications for the affected patients will likely be irreversible and life-lasting.
Change Healthcare is one of the world’s largest facilitators of health and medical data and patient records, handling billions of healthcare transactions annually.
The cybersecurity director expressed alarm at the prospect of the hackers potentially publishing the stolen sensitive patient data online.
For those on the front-lines of healthcare cybersecurity, the worst-case scenario is that stolen patient records become public.
Do you work at Change Healthcare, Optum or UnitedHealth and know more about the cyberattack?
