Browsing Tag: Startups

Estate planning in the U.S. is a $180 billion industry and, unlike many of the other areas in the multitrillion-dollar financial services market, it’s one that has yet to see a slew of technology companies come in to try to improve efficiencies.

One notable exception is Trust & Will, the San Diego-based startup that has announced a new $6 million investment to expand sales and marketing, product development and partnerships.

The company joins services like Quicken’s WillMaker and startups like Everplans as relatively new entrants into the technology-enabled estate planning business.

Timing seems good for the company and its other competitors. The $180 billion estate planning business is expected to surge as millennials start having children and begin thinking about their wills. It joins other staid businesses like life insurance and home insurance as a category that’s traditionally been overlooked by entrepreneurs who now see increasingly digital customers make demands of industry participants.

Right now, half of all adults in the U.S. have no will and millions more have out-of-date estate plans, according to Trust & Will. In addition, 45 million parents with minor children have no form of estate plan.

Since its launch in April, Trust & Will has had 60,000 members enroll in the company’s platform; those enrollments represent $15.1 billion in total assets, $2.7 billion in reported life insurance policies, $137 million in charitable commitments and 88% holding real estate assets.

The company has a tiered subscription model offering a $399-$499 service plus an annual subscription fee for the creation of a trust-based estate plan that the company says can avoid probate for the protection and transfer of assets; a $69-$129 level, which includes plans for surviving beneficiaries and asset distribution; and a $39-$49 plan for parents with minor children who aren’t ready to complete a will.

While customers may be able to draft a will themselves and just store it in a safe place, some people will likely gravitate to a digital will. At least, that’s what Link Ventures, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Western Technology Investment, Techstars Ventures, Luma Launch and Halogen Ventures are hoping for with their commitment to the company’s Series A financing.

In January, the company closed its first electronic will with help from its industry partner, Notarize. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Cody Barbo, former product ad marketing strategist Daniel Goldstein and product designer Brian Lamb, the company now counts 11 people on staff.

“Trust & Will is another example of how digital services are disrupting traditional industries by offering a convenient and lower-cost estate planning solution that helps consumers protect their valuable assets and loved ones,” said Rob Chaplinsky, a managing director at Trust & Will’s series A lead investor, Link Ventures. “We have been following this category for quite some time and feel that Trust & Will’s product and rapid market traction are second to none. We look forward to leveraging our big data assets to help them scale.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | San Diego’s Trust & Will raises million for online estate planning

Open source has become a critical building block of modern software, and today a new startup is coming out of stealth to capitalise on one of the newer frontiers in open source: using it to build and manage distributed application environments, an approach being used increasingly to handle large computing projects, such as those involving artificial intelligence or scientific or other complex calculations.

Anyscale, a startup founded by the same team that built the Project Ray open-source distributed programming framework out of UC Berkeley — Robert Nishihara, Philipp Moritz and Ion Stoica, and Berkeley professor Michael I. Jordan — has raised $20.6 million in a Series A round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation also from NEA, Intel Capital, Ant Financial, Amplify Partners, 11.2 Capital and The House Fund.

The company plans to use the money to build out its first commercial products — details of which are still being kept under wraps but will more generally include the ability to easily scale out a computing project from one laptop to a cluster of machines; and a group of libraries and applications to manage projects. These are expected to launch next year.

“Right now we are focused on making Ray a standard for building applications,” said Stoica in an interview. “The company will build tools and a runtime platform for Ray. So, if you want to run a Ray application securely and with high performance then you will use our product.”

The funding is partly strategic: Intel is one of the big companies that has been using Ray for its own computing projects, alongside Amazon, Microsoft and Ant Financial.

“Intel IT has been leveraging Ray to scale Python workloads with minimal code modifications,” said Moty Fania, principal engineer and chief technology officer for Intel IT’s Enterprise and Platform Group, in a statement. “With the implementation into Intel’s manufacturing and testing processes, we have found that Ray helps increase the speed and scale of our hyperparameter selection techniques and auto modeling processes used for creating personalized chip tests. For us, this has resulted in reduced costs, additional capacity and improved quality.”

With an impressive user list like this for the free-to-use Ray, you might ask yourself, what is the purpose of Anyscale? As Stoica and Nishihara explained, the idea will be to create simpler and easier ways to implement Ray, to make it usable whether you’re one of the Amazons of the world, or a more modest, and possibly less tech-centric operation.

“We see that this will be valuable mostly for companies who do not have engineering experts,” Stoica said.

The problem that Anyscale is solving is a central one to the future of large-scale, involved computing projects: there are an increasing array of problems that are being tackled with computing solutions, but as the complexity of the work involved increases, there is a limit to how much work a single machine (even a big one) can handle. (Indeed, Anyscale cites IDC figures estimating that the amount of data created and copied annually will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025.)

While one day there may be quantum-computing machines that can run efficiently and at scale to address these kinds of tasks, today this isn’t a realistic option, and so distributed computing has emerged as a solution.

Ray was devised as a standard to use to implement distributed computing environments, but on its own it’s too technical for the uninitiated to use.

“Imagine you’re a biologist,” added Nishihara. “You can write a simple program and run it at a large scale, but to do that successfully you need not only to be a biology expert but a computing expert. That’s just way too high a barrier.”

The people behind Anyscale (and Ray) have a long and very credible list of other work behind them that speaks to the opportunities that are being spotted here. Stoica, for example, was also the co-founder of Databricks, Conviva and one of the original developers of Apache Spark.

“I worked on Databricks with Ion and that’s how it started,” Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz said in an interview. He added that the firm has been a regular investor into projects coming out of UC Berkeley. Ray, and more specifically Anyscale, is notable for its relevance to today’s computing needs.

“With Ray it was a very attractive project because of the open-source metrics but also because of the issue it addresses,” he said.

“We’ve been grappling with Moore’s Law being over, but more interestingly, it’s inadequate for things like artificial intelligence applications,” where increasing computing power is needed that outstrips what any single machine can do. “You have to be able to deal with distributed computing, but the problem for everyone but Google is that distributed computing is hard, so we have been looking for a solution.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Anyscale, from the creators of the Ray distributed computing project, launches with .6M led by a16z

This morning ProdPerfect, a technology startup focused on web application testing, announced a $13 million Series A led by Anthos Capital. Anthos is perhaps best known for investing in Honey, a startup which recently sold to PayPal for several billion dollars.

ProdPerfect, a remote-focused company, closed a $2.6 million seed round earlier in 2019. Fika Ventures and Eniac Ventures took part in the Series A after also putting capital into the company in the company’s preceding seed investment. The startup has now raised $15.7 million across three rounds, according to Crunchbase.

What does ProdPerfect’s product do regarding testing? And what is it going to do with all its new money? TechCrunch chatted with Dan Widing, ProdPerfect’s founder and CEO, to answer those questions, and learn how quickly the company is growing.

Testing

ProdPerfect automates end-to-end testing for web developers. According to Widing, the product “followed some of the lessons of the product analytics industry to build a tool that lets us quantitatively understand how our customers’ live users traverse the customers’ web application.” The company estimates that “many companies are compelled to put around 20% of their engineering budget into staffing a QA engineering department,” spend that it reckons it can help cut.

The web is a big place, with lots of pages and apps and more built and maintained by a global army of developers. Those end products require testing to find errors and bugs that could cause havoc for end users and companies alike. You can test well, or poorly. But according to Widing, the “gold standard of web testing is either directly or indirectly controlling a browser to traverse the site like a user does,” also known as “end-to-end testing.”

The product seems to have found early market traction. According to Widing, 18 months after landing its first handful of customers, his company has reached the 50-customer mark, generating “around $2 million” in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a standard revenue metric for modern software (SaaS) companies.

What’s next

When TechCrunch last covered ProdPerfect, we called it a “Boston-based startup focused on automating QA testing for web apps.” All of that is still true aside from the location. According to its CEO, ProdPerfect transferred its headquarters from Boston to San Francisco earlier in 2019. However, Widing said, ProdPerfect doesn’t focus on the move much, as it views itself as “a remote-first company.”

But no matter where its nexus sits, the company plans on investing heavily in sales and marketing spend (traditional for a Series A-level company looking to quickly expand revenue), and invest in “product development and customer service,” according to Widing. So, tech investments, go-to-market spend and a modest war chest for the future are the game plan for ProdPerfect’s new money. (Widing noted in an email to TechCrunch that “it helps to have a good stockpile” in times of global macro uncertainty, which is a smart perspective.)

The firm ARR figure that ProdPerfect provided will help the market vet its progress over the next few years. The company will probably aim for more than a doubling in size next year, more likely shooting for a tripling. So, how close to $6 million ARR that ProdPerfect can reach in 2020 will be fun to watch. If the firm manages that sort of growth, expect it to raise again to keep investing in its product and go-to-market motion.

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Automated web app testing startup ProdPerfect raises M Series A led by Anthos Capital

HackerRank, a popular platform for practicing and hosting online coding interviews, today announced that it has acquired Mimir, a cloud-based service that provides tools for teaching computer science courses. Mimir, which is HackerRank’s first acquisition, is currently in use by a number of universities, including UCLA, Purdue, Oregon State and Michigan State, as well as by corporations like Google.

HackerRank says it will continue to support Mimir’s classroom product as a standalone product for the time being. By Q2 2020, the two companies expect to have an initial release of a combined product offering.

“HackerRank will work closely with professors, students and customers to help student developers learn, improve and assess their skills from coursework to career,” Vivek Ravisankar, the co-founder and CEO of HackerRank, told me. “Ultimately, we envision a combined product that allows students to obtain both a formal academic education as well as practical skills assessments which can help build a strong and successful career.”

The two companies did not disclose the financial details of the acquisition, but Indiana-based Mimir previously raised a total of $2.5 million and had eight employees at the time of the acquisition, including the three-person executive team.

As the companies stress, both focus on allowing developers for a variety of backgrounds to successfully vie for jobs, no matter where they went to school. HackerRank argues that the combination of its existing services and Mimir’s classroom tools will “provide computer science classrooms with the most comprehensive developer assessment platform on the market; allowing students to better prepare for real-world programming and universities to more accurately evaluate student progress.” The idea here clearly is to expand HackerRank’s reach into the world of academia and expand the talent pool for its customers who are looking to recruit from its users, but Ravisankar also noted that he hopes the combined strengths of HackerRank and Mimir will allow students to combine their academic learning with market learning. “This will ensure that they’re equipped with the skills that their future workplaces require,” he said.

Mimir isn’t so much a tool for massive online courses but instead focuses on helping teachers and students manage programming projects and assignments. To do so, it offers a full online IDE, as well as support for Jupyter notebooks, as well as more traditional teaching tools for creating quizzes and assignments. The built-in IDE supports 40 programming languages, including Python, Java and C. There’s also a tool for detecting plagiarism.

Currently, about 15,000 to 20,000 students are using Mimir’s platform for their coursework. That’s dwarfed by the 7 million developers who have signed up for HackerRank so far, but not all of those are active, while, almost by default, all of Mimir’s users will be on the job market sooner or later.

“Mimir has made a name for itself by becoming a secret weapon for computer science programs — Mimir equips them with the tools to make a real difference in the education of developers,” said Prahasith Veluvolu, co-founder and CEO of Mimir. “Working with HackerRank is a natural evolution of our mission, allowing our customers to scale their programs while simultaneously giving students an unmatched classroom experience to prepare them for the careers of tomorrow.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | HackerRank acquires Mimir, an online platform for computer science courses

The amount of data that most companies now store — and the places they store it — continues to increase rapidly. With that, the risk of the wrong people managing to get access to this data also increases, so it’s no surprise that we’re now seeing a number of startups that focus on protecting this data and how it flows between clouds and on-premises servers. Satori Cyber, which focuses on data protecting and governance, today announced that it has raised a $5.25 million seed round led by YL Ventures.

“We believe in the transformative power of data to drive innovation and competitive advantage for businesses,” the company says. “We are also aware of the security, privacy and operational challenges data-driven organizations face in their journey to enable broad and optimized data access for their teams, partners and customers. This is especially true for companies leveraging cloud data technologies.”

Satori is officially coming out of stealth mode today and launching its first product, the Satori Cyber Secure Data Access Cloud. This service provides enterprises with the tools to provide access controls for their data, but maybe just as importantly, it also offers these companies and their security teams visibility into their data flows across cloud and hybrid environments. The company argues that data is “a moving target” because it’s often hard to know how exactly it moves between services and who actually has access to it. With most companies now splitting their data between lots of different data stores, that problem only becomes more prevalent over time and continuous visibility becomes harder to come by.

“Until now, security teams have relied on a combination of highly segregated and restrictive data access and one-off technology-specific access controls within each data store, which has only slowed enterprises down,” said Satori Cyber CEO and co-founder Eldad Chai. “The Satori Cyber platform streamlines this process, accelerates data access and provides a holistic view across all organizational data flows, data stores and access, as well as granular access controls, to accelerate an organization’s data strategy without those constraints.”

Both co-founders (Chai and CTO Yoav Cohen) previously spent nine years building security solutions at Imperva and Incapsula (which acquired Imperva in 2014). Based on this experience, they understood that onboarding had to be as easy as possible and that operations would have to be transparent to the users. “We built Satori’s Secure Data Access Cloud with that in mind, and have designed the onboarding process to be just as quick, easy and painless. On-boarding Satori involves a simple host name change and does not require any changes in how your organizational data is accessed or used,” they explain.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Satori Cyber raises .25M to help businesses protect their data flows

Attention Capital, a new outfit that buys, builds and scales media brands, is acquiring Girlboss, the female-focused multi-media business founded by Sophia Amoruso, who will join the firm as a founder partner.

A spokesperson for LA-based Girlboss declined to disclose terms of the deal, but said Attention Capital has acquired 100% of the business. Girlboss had raised $3.1 million in venture capital funding in 2017 from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Today’s announcement represents Amoruso’s second exit, though her first M&A deal was more of a rescue operation. She previously founded and led the millennial retailer Nasty Gal, growing it from a small eBay store to a fashion giant that observed more than $300 million in sales at one point in time. Ultimately, Nasty Gal lost its way. The business filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2016 after raising $65 million over its 10 years of operation.

In 2017, Nasty Gal was acquired for a meager $20 million. Meanwhile, Amoruso was on to a new and similarly venture-backed business, one born out of the success of her book, #GIRLBOSS, which the company said has sold more than 500,000 copies since it was published in 2014.

“Girlboss is built on the idea of powering growth through community,” Girlboss chief executive officer Amoruso said in a statement. “The Girlboss movement’s viral success makes evident that women are more successful if they have access to each other and can share their experiences.”

Attention Capital, founded by media heavyweights including former Fox Networks Group president Joe Marchese, Snap’s former head of content Nick Bell and former Palantir executive Ashlyn Gentry, seeks to acquire media and technology platforms that “properly measure and value attention and are positioned to exponentially benefit in a market correction of the attention economy.” The new firm plans to raise up to $500 million, according to earlier reporting. Attention Capital has previously acquired a majority stake in Tribeca Enterprises through a deal led by James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems.

“Girlboss is an internationally known brand that is redefining what it means to be entrepreneurial—it’s not just starting your own business, it’s taking a risk, looking for that next role, making a career switch and taking a step into the unknown,” Gentry, the former senior vice president of commercial growth and business strategy at Palantir, wrote in a statement. “Millions of women feel more comfortable going on this journey because they know they have Sophia and the global Girlboss community right there with them. The loyalty and passion that this brand captures makes it a massive market opportunity and at Attention Capital we’re looking forward to working with the team on Girlboss’s expansion.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | New media investment firm Attention Capital acquires Girlboss

HungerBox, an Indian food tech startup that has courted 10 of the 11 largest companies in the country to use its services, today announced it has raised $12 million from Paytm and others as it looks to sign clients in Southeast Asia.

The three-year-old startup’s new financing round, a Series C, was funded by a consortium of Indian and international investors, including payments firm Paytm and NPTK, an Asian VC fund that invests in emerging firms. Existing investors Sabre Partners and Neoplux also participated in the round, which pushes the Bangalore-based startup’s to-date raise to $16.5 million.

HungerBox offers management services to companies and institutions to improve and run their in-house cafeterias and canteens. HungerBox also enables its clients to connect with food partners through an app and get real-time updates of their order.

The startup, which also provides these firms with a point-of-sale machine, helps them get better insight into the quality of food being catered to their employees, and enables scheduled delivery and tracking of orders to address the long queues, said Sandipan Mitra, co-founder and chief executive of HungerBox, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“We all talk about the food delivery to consumers, but not many are looking to improve the quality of food and how it is being catered to tens of millions of employees in the country each day,” he said. “It’s a challenge that has not been addressed well.”

It turns out, when a startup finally looked into the space, many quickly jumped to appreciate it. HungerBox has amassed more than 126 large businesses and institutions — with more than 100,000 workforce each, across 18 Indian cities, said Mitra. Food delivery startups Swiggy and Zomato have started to explore this space, too, in recent quarters.

HungerBox is processing 560,000 orders each day, a figure that is growing 10% every month, claimed Mitra. The startup’s solutions are today employed at more than 535 cafeterias for its clients that work in IT / technology, retail, healthcare, aviation, education, financial services and manufacturing, he said. He declined to reveal the name of the clients, citing confidential agreements.

Annual food sales on the HungerBox platform have exceeded $100 million, he said.

The startup, which employs 1,500 people, will use the fresh capital to fuel its expansion in 10 additional Indian cities and to markets in Southeast Asia, said Mitra.

In a statement, Madhur Deora, president of Paytm, said HungerBox has enabled Paytm to add new use cases for the company’s payments business and digitization of offline transactions.

“HungerBox is the market leader in the institutional food tech space and we will partner closely with them and bring the benefits of Paytm’s ecosystem to HungerBox,” he said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Indian B2B food tech startup HungerBox raises M from Paytm and others

Most tech companies — particularly B2B companies — either don’t understand the power of a brand, or do a really poor job of creating one.

An informal survey of a dozen of my young CEO friends showed that, given the choice, 10 out of 12 — 83% — would rather spend an extra dollar on product development than brand-building. It is dangerous (or at least foolish) to assume that the ROI on product development is greater than the ROI on brand building.

As a serial entrepreneur and CEO, I have had to make this choice many times. In 2006, I co-founded PC backup company Carbonite . I left the company five years ago after taking it public and I no longer have any financial interest in it, which is why I can write about it now — it was just sold for $1.4 billion to OpenText. There were many other backup products on the market at that time and many more appeared over the first five years of the company’s life. I would argue that Carbonite was slicker than most of the others, but essentially every backup product accomplishes the same result.

Unlike Carbonite’s competitors, we focused on our brand. That meant raising more money than we would have if we were just investing in R&D. But, after five years of investing in our brand, we had eleven times the brand recognition of any other consumer backup company and we dominated the market.

Here’s why: a study by Kettlefire Creative showed that 59% of people prefer to buy brands that they have heard of. Since none of our competitors had widely recognized brands, we got most of that 59%. Of the remaining 41%, we fought it out on other criteria and won most of that as well. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer looking to back up their PC. What do you worry about? Well, before we even launched the company, we asked PC owners to choose the five most important attributes of their ideal backup company from a list of ten possible attributes, and we found the following:

1. Trustworthy: you won’t look at my files or allow anyone to see them (1127 votes)

2. Peace of mind: when I go to retrieve my backup, it will always be there (811 votes)

3. Reliable: it backs up everything and doesn’t stop (696 votes)

4. Helpful: if I lose my computer, I want to talk to a human who can help me (446 votes)

5. Easy: it should be simple and require little attention (444 votes)

The attributes that didn’t make the top five:

6. Fast: backups happen quickly

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Brand power vs. product power

Plenty of the ocean remains unexplored, even though it’s a huge trove of potentially valuable information. Current methods for mapping and gathering ocean data, especially deep-ocean data, generally require humans in the mix (even if controlling vehicles remotely), are immensely expensive and are not designed for long periods of operation. Startup Terradepth, founded by two ex-Navy SEALs and based in Austin, Texas, is aiming to change all that using autonomous submersible vehicles that can, if deployed as a fleet with adequate scale, provide access to deep-ocean information on a data-as-a-service basis.

The startup has raised $8 million in funding in a new round led by storage hardware company Seagate Technology, and the funding will help it pursue its ambitious goal of demonstrating their technology at work in an open-water environment by next summer. From there, it hopes to scale its operations the following year, and ultimately operate an entire networked fleet of its fully autonomous underwater robots, which it calls “Autonomous Hybrid Vehicles,” or AxV.

Terradepth says that its technology will be able to operate at a scale and cost not previously possible because of their use of autonomous navigation, and it will aim to offer raw data, information processed through their own machine-learning powered analytics layer, or cloud-based third-party analytics. They aim to offer multispectral imaging, surveillance and monitoring/forecasting services for off-shore equipment and resources.

In addition to co-founders Joe Wolfel and Judson Kauffman, Terradepth’s small team includes a range of roboticists and engineers with expertise in both software and hardware. Their vehicles are designed to alternate between deep ocean passes and trips to the water’s surface, with underwater AxV communicating with the surface-based robots, which are simultaneously recharging, which then pass on data collected to satellites for relaying back to data centers and customers.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Terradepth raises million to build a fleet of autonomous deep-ocean data robots

The world of healthcare has notoriously been described as “broken” — plagued with high-friction workflows, sky-high costs and convoluted business models.

Over the past several years, a long list of innovative startups and salivating venture investors have pinned their focus on repairing the healthcare industry, but its digital transformation still appears to be in the very early innings. After a record-setting 2018, however, digital health investing continued to reach meteoric heights in 2019.

Mammoth pools of capital have flooded into various sub-verticals and business models, backing collections of new B2B and B2C companies focused on optimizing healthcare workflows, improving healthcare access and offering lower-cost distribution models. Over the past two years, digital health startups have raised well over $10 billion in funding across nearly 1,000 deals, according to data from Pitchbook and Crunchbase.

As we close out another strong year for innovation and venture investing in the sector, we asked nine leading VCs who work at firms spanning early to growth stages to share what’s exciting them most and where they see opportunity in the sector:

• Annie Case, Kleiner Perkins
• Zavain Dar, Lux Capital
• Adam Goulburn, Lux Capital
• Kristin Baker Spohn, CRV
• Raju Rishi, RRE Ventures
• Olivia Lew, General Catalyst
• Bill Liao, SOSV
• Jennifer Hartt, Ben Franklin Technology Partners
• John Prendergass, Ben Franklin Technology Partners

Participants discuss trends in digital therapeutics, telehealth, mental health and the latest in biotech and medical devices, while also diving into startups improving medical practitioner efficiency, evaluating the evolving regulatory environment and debating valuations and offering a ‘temp check’ on the market for digital health startups leveraging ML.

Annie Case, Kleiner Perkins

Although Kleiner Perkins has a long history of investing in iconic health companies, we believe it is still the early innings of digital health as a category today.

When I evaluate new opportunities in the space, I often start by thinking through how the company will move the needle on cost, quality, and access to care — the “iron triangle” of health care systems. Conventional wisdom has been that it’s impossible to improve all three dimensions simultaneously, but we are seeing companies leverage technology to shift this paradigm in meaningful ways.

It’s no longer just a promise. For example, Viz.ai is using artificial intelligence to detect and alert stroke teams to suspected large vessel occlusion strokes, enabling patients to get treatment faster. Their workflows improve access to life-saving care, deliver higher quality through reduced time to treatment (every minute counts as ‘time is brain’ in stroke care), and dramatically reduce the costs associated with long-term disability.

We are also seeing companies provide this type of tech-enabled care outside of the hospital setting. Modern Health is a mental health benefits platform that employers are making available to their employees. The platform triages individual employees to the right level of care, providing clinical care to those with diagnosable depression or anxiety, and making self-guided or preventative care available to everyone else. Their solution improves quality and access by offering mental health services to every employee and reduces the cost associated with untreated mental illness, lost productivity, or employee churn.

Heading into 2020, we’re eager to back digital health companies in new areas that leverage technology to impact cost, quality, and access. A few spaces that I’m excited about are behavioral health (mental health, substance abuse, addiction, etc), care navigation, digital therapeutics, and new models integrating telehealth, remote care and AI to better leverage medical professionals’ time.

Zavain Dar and Adam Goulburn, Lux Capital

Below are some thoughts and coming predictions on health tech broadly:

1. Digital therapeutics continue to pick up steam — on the back of Pear and Akili, more companies push to FDA and enter the market. In addition, broader consumer platforms like Calm and Headspace look to broaden their offerings by investigating clinical approvals.
2. At least one major pharma looks to expand its consumer surface area by acquiring one of the new digital, consumer-facing generics platform (ex Hims, Ro, NuRx).
3. Venture funding for biotech continues to boom with at least three Series A’s of $100M or more in size.
4. Drug discovery for neurodegeneration sees a renaissance. High-profile failings of Biogen and the beta-amyloid hypothesis sees a shift of innovation to early-stage biotech and venture creation.
5. Big pharma has its DeepMind moment acquiring at least one machine-learning (AI) enabled drug discovery company.
6. Clinical trial tech investments heat up; new companies and technologies emerge to make trials patients first and systems get smarter at finding the right patients at their point of care; large incumbents like IQVIA, LabCorp and PPD get acquisitive.
7. At least three traditional Sand Hill Road tech venture firms open life science practices or raise dedicated funds.
8. Machine learning targets chemistry driven by large advancements in transformer (NLP) models; has the time for computational chemistry finally come?
9. HCIT sees a renaissance driven by increased CIO responsibility towards data interoperability. Companies either working on federated ML to allow systems to speak to each other or lightweight edge applications enabling rapid clinical deployment will see quick uptake and traction, until now impossible in HC.

Kristin Baker Spohn, CRV

In the last 10 years, digital health has exploded. Over $16B has been invested in the sector by VCs and we’ve seen IPOs from Livongo, Progyny and Health Catalyst, just in the last year alone. That said, there’s still a lot that mystifies people about the sector — there are spots that are overheated and models that will struggle to deliver venture scale outcomes. I’ve seen digital health evolve first hand as both an operator and investor, and I’m more excited than ever about the future of the space.

A few areas and trends that I’ve been following recently include:

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Where top VCs are investing in digital health