Rebecca Torrence

Investor excitement in AI exploded last year as funding to venture-backed startups broadly slumped. One healthcare startup is riding that wave in the new year with a fresh round of funding.Cohere Health just landed $50 million in Series B extension funding, Business Insider has learned exclusively. Deerfield Management led the Series B extension, with participation from Define Ventures, Flare Capital Partners, Longitude Capital, and Polaris Partners.The AI-powered startup contracts with health i…

Tracy Warren cofounded Astarte Medical in 2016 to improve care for premature babies.Eight years later, at the end of December, she told her board of directors over a tearful Zoom call that she planned to shut the company down.The somber call capped Astarte’s story before the company truly hit its stride. Astarte, which sells software to standardize nutrition for babies in intensive care units, had raised $14 million in venture funding to date and landed contracts with four hospitals. It had big…

Healthcare staffing startup Nomad Health just slashed its workforce for the third time in a year, Business Insider has learned.The startup, which matches nurses and other clinicians to open jobs in healthcare, cut staff on Wednesday, according to two former employees and more than a dozen LinkedIn posts. The former employees asked not to be identified to avoid retribution from the company.Nomad Health’s chief marketing officer Maquel Shaw confirmed the layoffs in an email to Business Insider. Sh…

Last August, Kim Kardashian posted on Instagram that she’d gotten a full-body MRI scan from the startup Prenuvo, which sparked a national conversation about the merits of preventive imaging.A handful of startups have built their businesses around offering fully-body scans, available to anyone to screen for medical conditions before symptoms arise. With Kardashian’s help, the scans were finally making headlines — and healthtech startup Ezra felt their impact.“The day that Kim Kardashian got a sca…

Generative AI is heating up in healthcare — and one startup is raising more funding to help clinicians with the tech.Medical scribe startup Abridge, which uses AI to record doctor-patient conversations and make notes in the patient’s electronic health record, is in talks to close a substantial round of funding less than four months after announcing its last fundraise, according to three people with knowledge of the efforts.Two of those people said Abridge was seeking to raise at least $50 millio…

Kindbody’s fundraising push is getting complex as the fertility unicorn dangles discounts to potential investors to secure new cash, Business Insider has learned.Last year, the startup set out to raise $50 million at a $1.8 billion valuation, the same valuation it achieved in its March 2023 financing round, Bloomberg first reported.Now, Kindbody has been forced to broaden its investor outreach and has pitched multiple early-stage VCs, according to two people with knowledge of the effort.The comp…

As countries worldwide vie to dominate the AI arms race, some investors think it’s time that the international community gets on the same page about where artificial intelligence is headed.One Silicon Valley venture capitalist — whose firm has backed tech giants like Snap and Stripe — says imposing “guardrails” and a spirit of “collaboration” across borders will be key.Numerous countries are eager for a slice of the pie as AI development picks up steam, Hemant Taneja, the CEO and managing direct…

As healthcare startups dive headfirst into building artificial intelligence products to sell to hospitals, a new report suggests many health systems don’t yet have policies to support the tech.In a survey of 34 US health systems leaders, only 16% reported having systemwide policies for AI usage and data access. And while some leaders noted having broader guidelines in place that could also apply to AI, the majority — 65% — said they had no policies for AI at all.The survey, conducted by the Cent…

AI is taking the world of venture capital by storm. Now, healthcare investors are racing to bet on startups applying the technology to doctors’ visits. A handful of companies building generative AI software to speed up the process of clinical documentation, with ambient scribe solutions to analyze patient-doctor conversations and synthesize them into the patient’s electronic medical record, have emerged from healthcare’s funding winter to grab stacks of cash. Most recently, Ambience Healthcare a…

Amir Dan Rubin announced the launch of his new VC firm, Healthier Capital, in December after capping his six-year stint as CEO of the primary care company One Medical.Now, the firm is already making its first bets.Healthier Capital announced its first two healthcare investments this month, co-leading a $21 million round for AI-powered medical imaging startup Ezra and backing behavioral health company Octave. Rubin told Business Insider earlier this month the firm was closing a third investment t…

Axel Bouchon cofounded Matter Neuroscience in 2019 after leading the venture arms of pharma giants Moderna and Bayer. Working in pharma, he set out to cure neurological disease — “and to be honest, I failed,” he told Business Insider.He now believes that neurological conditions like severe depression and addiction, while they can be treated, can’t ever be cured.That revelation led him to start Matter to search for a biomarker for happiness and seek to prevent the progression of neurological dise…

Only months after buzzy AI search-engine startup Perplexity AI raised its last round of funding, the company is yet again raising additional funds, as investors clamor to back tech’s next big generative AI startup. Over the past few months, Silicon Valley has been swooning over the startup, which rivals Google’s search and counts Jeff Bezos (who was an early backer of Google) as an investor.Perplexity is raising this additional money at a significantly higher valuation cap than its previous pric…

After a slow year for venture capital in 2023, the healthcare startup market is roaring back to life.More deals appear to be on the horizon as investors find themselves inundated with pitches from new startups hoping to grab cash. And, after withholding funds during the downturn, VCs are starting to write checks again.“This year has been, out of the gate, fast,” said Anargha Vardhana, partner at Maveron. “That first week, I was slammed. A lot of companies are fundraising, and I have a lot of new…

Sumit Nagpal has been building companies in digital health for decades. His last company, diagnostics maker LumiraDx, went public in a $3 billion SPAC deal in 2021. Before that, he started the electronic health records company Wellogic, which he sold in 2011 to Alere, now owned by pharma giant Abbott.Nagpal funded many of his past startups with traditional venture capital. But with his latest startup, Cherish Health, he’s taking a different approach.Nagpal’s new venture is running entirely on fu…

Livongo veteran Glen Tullman’s latest venture, healthcare startup Trascarent, is raising a Series D round, Business Insider has learned.Transcarent, which connects employers with a suite of medical services, is targeting a $125 million raise led by General Catalyst, according to two people with knowledge of the efforts.The sources said the round values Transcarent at about $2.1 billion.It’s been a difficult fundraising environment for growth-stage healthcare startups — and that’s reflected in Tr…

Startups are jumping into mental healthcare to treat people with substance use disorders. Healthtech startup Pelago just grabbed a fresh round of funding to power its own push.Pelago, which provides virtual care for substance use disorders including alcohol, tobacco, and opioids, recently announced $58 million in Series C funding led by Atomico, with participation from Kinnevik, Octopus Ventures, Y Combinator, and Eight Roads. All are existing investors in Pelago.The Series C was an upround for…

Access Industries, the investment firm founded by billionaire Len Blavatnik that invested in mental health company Cerebral, is suing the company and another of its backers as tensions mount inside the mental health company, according to documents obtained by Business Insider.It’s the latest challenge to the once-hot mental health startup, which launched in 2020 to provide mental healthcare online. A Business Insider investigation published in June 2022 found that Cerebral flouted clinical guide…

Healthcare deals are finally picking up again after a funding slump. And those deals — to the relief of many VCs — don’t look like they did before the downturn.In 2021, when digital health funding reached a fever pitch, countless startups landed millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars at sky-high valuations. But those valuations didn’t always reflect the financial success of the company, since some startups getting funded at that time had little to no revenue, minimal market traction, o…

Talk therapy startup Two Chairs is the latest mental-health player to close on a fresh round of venture funding.The company just raised $72 million in Series C equity and debt funding, led by existing investor Amplo, and including Fifth Down Capital and other unnamed investors. The startup secured the debt funding from Bridge Bank.Two Chairs, founded in 2017, sets itself apart with its data-driven therapist-patient matching, which it says helps patients stay in therapy for longer and drives bett…

Austin Walters started SpringTide Ventures in 2018 to disrupt healthcare by democratizing access to health innovations. The firm just closed its second $65 million fund to make more of those bets.SpringTide, which invests in health-focused software, hardware, and tech-enabled services — everything healthcare, save for drug development — has been climbing. The firm wrote early checks into companies like Great Expectations, originally a healthcare-focused data analytics company that raised a $40 m…