Healthy Ventures partners with founders seeking hybrid ears to hear.
Firm understanding of the idiosyncratic healthcare vertical
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Horizontal playbook of what's worked before, better in other markets
We think of it as 'Learning Curve Arbitrage'.
TEAM
Enmi has invested in early-stage ventures for over 20 years. Prior to starting Healthy Ventures, she invested with early-stage venture firms IDG Ventures and Boston Millennia Partners and as an angel in digital health ventures with investments including Omada, Elation, and Modern Meadow.
...Little known, but high-leverage, fact: so much of success in health tech is driven by unlocking distribution. Unlocking a product's path to scale distribution is a key priority and differentiator for Healthy's approach to health tech investing.
Besides investing, Enmi has worked with operating companies of varying sizes anchored around marketing. At NYTimes.com, Enmi focused on the revenue strategy of new digital products. Thereafter, Enmi founded a consumer email startup called replyforall that served both users and brand marketers. That chapter proved a non-stop lesson in the paramount importance of a founder’s surgical focus and ability to let go of preconceived notions and roadmaps. Enmi also tinkered as a vendor of e-books to get versed in affiliate marketing, a powerful channel of highly repeatable and cost-controllable customer acquisition.
Enmi graduated with an AB from Harvard University and an MBA from Wharton.
Vice President
Madi loves meeting passionate founders, learning about their evolving business models, and helping them work towards the shared goal of reimagining healthcare.
At Healthy Ventures, Madi splits her time between identifying new investments, mapping market ecosystems, and providing operational support to portfolio companies.
Prior to joining Healthy Ventures, Madi worked in investment banking with Cascadia Capital, a boutique advisory firm where she worked closely with healthcare and technology companies on M&A and capital raise.
Madi graduated from Harvard University with an AB in Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology.
Go-to-Market Operating Advisor
Darren drives the critical, early GTM work of Healthy's portfolio companies.
After starting his health tech career in sales, he led marketing for a seed-stage health tech company (Able Health) that was acquired by a big, publicly-traded health tech company (Health Catalyst) where he led GTM and Growth initiatives. This journey informs Darren's genuine empathy for the daily realities of early-stage founders, as well as the best practices and market context gleaned from bigger orgs.
Chief of Staff
Ros brings more than a decade of collaborating with entrepreneurs and operators. Her strong background in business ops, critical path analysis, and communications lends itself so well to powering our own infrastructure.
Advisor
Steve knows how to create value in healthcare: leading clinically proven solutions to market, navigating payer distribution. CEO of AbleTo, an Optum / United Health company.
Advisor
MaryJo has circled several aspects of the pharma industry, as CIO of Parexel and previously CIO of R&D for Merck and Janssen. A sherpa for all things biopharma data related.
Advisor
Hill is the OG of telemedicine, having the vision to found Doctors-on-Demand well before the pandemic made it mainstream. Strong sense of user-empathetic product and adept at navigating payer reimbursement.
Advisor
Bing has stayed in the HV family - as founder & CEO of HealthCrowd which we backed and successfully exited. Regulated payer markets (Medicaid/Medicare), and 0->1 founder playbook.
Advisor
Hari fires on all cylinders all the time, especially about insuretech and predictive things data-informed. Founder of Predilytics, Verikai, Radion Health.
Advisor
Chris is the founder of the iconic early-stage venture firm Lowercase Capital and now of Lowercarbon Capital. Sees trends before they're trends.
Advisor
Liam is the co-founder of .406 Ventures, a venture firm focused on health tech and cybersecurity. Rife with market insights, sage of team-building.
We invest in infrastructural solutions that enable technologies to scale healthcare. These are often enterprise- and developer-facing products.
Broadly speaking, our investment criteria maps to the intersection among:
Management + Market size + Market readiness + Business model
Every company's early strengths are distributed differently among these buckets, but we like to see each one at least represented.
Another thing we look for is tight near-term focus and extensibility. This is when entrepreneurs have a tight plan for a clear solution to a painful problem AND know how executing against that will position it as a deeper platform with even more tentacles of value creation. There's great potential in healthcare for many trojan horses: plentiful pain points allow for several entry points and the system's tight ecoystem offer natural adjacencies.
We support our partner founders by serving as management-extenders. There are only so many hours in a day and only so many days of the year. We've built a platform to help cheat the clock and boost both their day-to-day capacity and also the company's overall runway.
LAND those valuable early customers. We have established relationships throughout the healthcare system with actual line managers and internal champions, the right people to listen to your proposals and sign those LOI's and contracts. This is a short, finely curated list of dynamic workhorse managers (director and VP-levels) who are the relevant decision-makers in organizations to assess how your solution can be implemented.
BUILD out your small ninja team. We lean on our own differentiated rolodexes to un-silo talent pools, a happy side effect of having spent our careers in non-overlapping orbits. One thing we've seen over and over again is that there are distinct silos of talent depending on the company's founding.
For example, a team with strong product and design sensibilities, more typically found among former consumer tech entrepreneurs, will often lack an adequately deep healthcare perspective. Vice versa, often with clinician founded teams, they would be well-served by augmenting with product-centric and marketing talent. Human-centered design in an enterprise software for doctors would turn serious heads. We use our networks which inherently straddle both worlds to help identify those key first hires that will round out a team's inevitably weaker functional areas.
TRANSLATE idiosyncratic healthcare problems into actual business solutions that matter. It's hard to know if a seeming problem in healthcare is impactful enough to amount to a real business. There are paradigms and paradoxes of healthcare that can confound many entrepreneurs, even seasoned ones.
Without having been in it for decades, it's hard to know if anyone in the targeted healthcare segment will embrace a proposed solution and/or if there's any way to actually make money with it. With a multi-faceted operational and investor perspective on healthcare, we cross-reference your early hypotheses against the particularly tricky realities of healthcare.
STRENGTHEN your chances for follow-on funding. We know how later stage investors think because both of us have spent meaningful time assessing later stage investments. We'll help you beat the odds that you, unlike 50-60% of seed stage ventures, will get your Series A done.
Investors like to learn about a company's progress in certain ways because they have a certain perspective and agenda that need to be taken into account. Tapping into the muscle memory of our earlier lives, we'll help frame the investment narrative and present both past and future execution milestones in a way that's intuitive for follow-on investors.
PORTFOLIO
Apply to ALL opportunities across our companies here.
Akido is solving a big problem in healthcare. The founding team got so frustrated with IT integration queues and data governance issues at hospitals that they started Akido. Akido provides a turn-key solution for application developers and hospitals to significantly compress the typically excruciating lag of working together.
Anagram
Anagram removes the pain from the otherwise very painful process of submitting out-of-network claims to get reimbursed by your insurance company. This is possible because of the team's deep understanding of the technical and workflow friction points associated with both the claims adjudication and point of sale processes. Their solutions help all of us use our their insurance plan's offerings more robustly - with none of the typical hassle.
Andros
All healthcare begins with credentialing. Before a provider can deliver and bill for any health care services, they must be credentialed by the practice/hospital system and by the payer (insurance company). This tedious and repetitive process is most often completed manually. As care delivery is expanding to applications (e.g., diabetes apps, telemedicine, doctor housecalls), the number of entities that need help credentialing is exploding. Andros's automated credentialing solution helps everyone stay up-to-date at a fraction of the cost.
Butterfly Labs
Patient care is quickly moving to the home. Butterfly Labs rounds this out with a turn-key infrastructure to power at-home lab testing. With the ease of a single API, Butterfly Labs provides an end-to-end solution to seamlessly deliver valuable patient data with unprecedented convenience and higher compliance: win-win for everyone.
Carta Healthcare
While a specific analysis might take minutes or hours, getting data cleaned and organized, to the point where it's possible to analyze - takes days or weeks. In healthcare, this data architecture problem is even more acute. Carta was founded by a mathematician and a physicist who understand how to solve very difficult data problems. In Carta, they've productized that insight and have already built out use-cases that customers are buying.
ClinCapture
Therapeutics are getting more and more targeted. As a result, the number of small clinical trials performed each year is exploding. Whether it's pre-approval clinical trials or late-phase trials, the market is asking for modular electronic data capture systems with features that will enable real-world evidence generation. ClinCapture's team are experienced clinical trial software executives who have positioned ClinCapture to uniquely go after these rapidly expanding markets.
Concert Health
The primary care physician (PCP) is the main interface with the health system for about half of the population. PCPs often see warning signs for behaviors that adversely affect health outcome (e.g., behavioral health, addiction, etc) but don't have the time to address it with their patients. Concert Health is an outsourced service provider for those PCPs. It is a turn-key solution allowing their customers to immediately offer those services to their patients.
Cornerstone AI
Companies commonly point to data as their most valuable asset. Yet, data in healthcare is so dirty that it can only be used very narrowly. Cleaning it is a slow, expensive, mostly manual effort. CornerstoneAI is solving the fundamental problem for today’s data-intensive organizations: how to turn data into actionable insights. Cornerstone programmatically cleans customers' data and offers low-code/no-code data science enabling customers to generate insights.
Careers
Datica (acquired by Lyniate)
Datica solves two major problems in healthcare - democratizing access to and securing clinical data. It transforms the currently closed, silo-ed pools of electronic medical record (EMR) data into an open platform through EMR-agnostic API's. Additionally, as healthcare data is finally migrating to the cloud, companies need Datica's dynamic security monitoring product to ensure data stays protected during all processes.
DaylightRx
Analytics and workflow optimization in the pharmacy world
Decent
Health insurance plays a critical central role in supporting healthy lives for all. Yet, it remains an all-too inscrutable purchase decision and user experience for so many of us. Decent applies crypto tech, blockchain, and leading-edge referral tactics to offer a markedly different type of insurance that puts members first.
EasyHealth
In the US, everyday 20,000 Americans turn 65 years old and become eligible for healthcare coverage from Medicare. But there are SO many options and decisions to make - with very little clear information. EasyHealth serves as an understandable, trusted guide for a patient's health journey. They start at the very beginning with Medicare enrollment.
mPulse Mobile acquired HealthCrowd in 2021. Health plans and providers have a hard time engaging with patients in an effective way. HealthCrowd uses the same best practices of multivariate optimization found in ad tech to power messaging on their behalf. HealthCrowd’s analytics identify the best mode and style of communication to get messages across which are important for people's well-being.
HealthiPass (acquired by Sphere)
Driven by high deductible plans and by a shift to co-insurance, patients are bearing more and more direct financial responsibility for healthcare payments. Currently, patients pay less than half they owe. HealthiPass's product allows patients to understand their obligation, pay, and create payment plans resulting in payment rates above 90%!
Inbox Health
Inbox powers the payment pipe for healthcare costs that patients directly have to pay. This is a $1 trillion unmet market need. Till now, there's been no scale infrastructure for patient pay because historically there hasn't been the need need for it. This is quickly changing as consumers are increasingly on the hook to pay for healthcare costs out-of-pocket. Inbox provides software that is intuitive and intelligent to finally serve well both the billing service providers that work with doctor practices and patients like you and me.
Live Chair Health
Live Chair meets patients where they are -- literally. LCH combines the best of community-organizing, consumer marketing, and tech to drive engagement starting right within historically underserved communities.
MACRO Trials
MACRO Trials focuses on distributed clinical trials, especially in the fast growing and operationally difficult rare disease space. They provide infrastructure to reduce the complexity of distributed trials in what's dubbed as "Site Optimization Organization.” This currently includes new site activation and site monitoring. In the future, they'll build products to help design trials, business intelligence to ensure they’re being executed appropriately, recommend amendments, and power the intelligence behind synthetically powering control arms.
Olive
Through its expertise in resolving patient identities and streamlining hospital intake, Olive realized that the largest underserved opportunity was helping customers with duplicate tasks. Healthcare is managed using many parallel but siloed systems. Users typically have to repeat the same task several times in several different systems. Olive uses its proprietary artificial intelligence to streamline repetitive tasks and creates interoperability using the systems customers already have in place.
One Codex (acquired by Invitae, Nasdaq: NVTA)
As the price of genomic data decreases, its applications multiply. Yet, bio-informatics continues to be a bottleneck. One Codex focuses on the microbial genomics market and allows users to go from 'data to answer,' and 'answer to analysis' instantaneously. This is useful in chronic disease diagnostics, infectious disease, agriculture, and food and environmental safety.
PokitDok (acquired by Change Healthcare, Nasdaq: CHNG)
Change Healthcare acquired PokitDok in 2018 to get access to one of the most extensive open API marketplaces available for healthcare transactions.
PokitDok's APIs add new capabilities for digital health, telemedicine, and other new, disruptive care models that support value-based, patient-centric healthcare. Additionally, PokitDok was the leader in blockchain for healthcare, enabling Change to become the first healthcare IT company to deploy blockchain at enterprise scale.
Season
Season uses existing rails in food supply chains to drive proper nutrition to consumers and reduce healthcare costs. They do this while leveraging the cost-intensive aspect of the actual physical delivery of food which others have invested in already. Josh and the team are targeting a multi-billion food-as-medicine market via an insurance payer distribution channel that unlocks scale access to patients.
Every company working in the human genome space must internally replicate the database of known genetic abnormalities. In addition, reproducibility of results remains an unmet need in clinical genomics. SolveBio addresses both through a scalable, on-demand variant curation service that enables companies and labs to massively scale their genomic medicine offerings. By combining a proprietary data harmonization engine with a global network of trained genomics experts, SolveBio delivers high-throughput, transparent, and reproducible sequence variant interpretation.
Sprockets
Sprockets creates a “fit” score to best match job seekers with companies, allowing employers to level-up their talent. What this means: Sprockets tech enables employers to hire more employees who are very much like their already known top-performers. The result is better employees, higher retention, and a more productive culture.
SubjectWell
Over 90% of clinical trials are plagued by costly delays, with failure to recruit enough patients as the biggest culprit by far. SubjectWell inverts the broken patient recruitment paradigm. Instead of fire drill campaigns to chase down the last patients for delayed trials, SubjectWell powers real-time patient matches through an ever-growing marketplace. This fundamentally, and permanently, changes the reach and economics of clinical trials.
Whiz.ai
Every part of a business is increasingly run by data. Yet, the majority of employees aren't data savvy and most companies can't afford armies of data scientists. Whiz.ai is a next generation advanced analytics company, focusing on the life-sciences vertical. It allows anyone to pull real-time data from any corporate data silo or run an analysis as easily as sending an SMS. Whiz.ai democratizes corporate data.
WootCloud (acquired by Netskope)
Endpoint devices (e.g., a speakerphone, an infusion pump, a cell phone) represent major network vulnerabilities. WootCloud not only automatically detects and characterizes all devices on a network, but it also types devices, risk stratifies devices and, in the case of breaches, customizes the necessary remediation. WootCloud sells its technology into all industries, but the problem is more prevalent in healthcare than in other verticals.
Zeguro (acquired by HSB, MunichRe)
Cybersecurity breaches are increasingly common. Healthcare leads all industries in the value (penalty) of a breached record. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are especially vulnerable as they're unable to invest significantly in security. Zeguro offers SMBs a SaaS product that effectively serves as an outsourced CISO. In addition, Zeguro understands its customers' needs and tailors cybersecurity insurance for them.
We'd love to hear your ideas and try to be helpful. Contact us below.
Even if it's not a fit for us, we'll respond to let you know as much and even try to suggest other investors who may be a fit.