TTA’s Spring Bigness: big raise for WHOOP, big buy for Anthropic, NYT’s big stumble on Medvi, big dissections of OpenAI, Carbon Health, big indictment of VA OEHRM former head, more!

Friday 10 April 2026

This week was a combination of big business news and big media news on healthcare and health AI. We had one stupendous raise for the WHOOP fitness/health tracker and a huge buy by Anthropic in the bio/research area. The Gray Lady’s attempt at AI hipness led to a stumble over Medvi, which may be the first billion-dollar AI created company but may have the lifespan of a fruit fly given its FDA and legal difficulties. The New Yorker’s long exposé of Sam Altman and OpenAI coupled with an equally long fresh dissection of Carbon Health’s February implosion are our Weekend Must Reads. Closing last week: the indictment of a former director of the VA’s Office of EHR Modernization on receiving and concealing cash and gifts from vendors.

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Two weekend ‘must reads’: the New Yorker’s Sam Altman/OpenAI exposé–and comments; a further deep dive into Carbon Health’s implosion

Perspectives: Exploring the Telehealth Extension: Building Infrastructures for Better Access

Funding/deal roundup: WHOOP’s $575M Giant raise, Anthropic buys med AI startup for $400M, early stage fundings for Jimini, Insight Health; Noom buys compounder; Mount Sinai NY to embed OpenEvidence

NY Times’ highly questionable but glowing–and viral–portrait of AI-created GLP-1 e-prescriber and marketer Medvi

Former VA EHRM executive director Federally charged with accepting vendor cash and gifts, making false statements

Last Week’s Hot News (was very hot indeed!)

Teladoc faces activist shareholder challenge, demanding $200M stock buyback, business spinoffs, cost cuts

A study in contrasts: OpenAI raises $122B, eMed’s $200M Series A. Then there’s Avo’s $10M Series A, Stedi’s $50M Series C. And Oracle expands Nashville campus!

The Oracle shoe dropped: Oracle lays off 18%–20-30K–of global employees, in their largest ever layoff (Updated 2 Apr)

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Telehealth & Telecare Aware – covering news on latest developments in telecare, telehealth and eHealth, worldwide.

Funding/deal roundup: WHOOP’s $575M Giant raise, Anthropic buys med AI startup for $400M, early stage fundings for Jimini, Insight Health; Noom buys compounder; Mount Sinai NY to embed OpenEvidence

Deals lately are very large…or very small. All have “AI” somewhere. Some unusual ones this past week.

The WHOOP wearable definitely whooped it up with a $575 million Series G (for Giant) funding. It’s a fitness and health watch that is reasonably trim and presentable sans a screen. It tracks sleep, activity, heart health and menstrual cycles (if applicable) through measurement of heart rate variability (HRV), resting heart rate (RHR), respiratory rate, and blood oxygen levels, and appeals to the very athletic with metrics around recovery and strain. The Boston-based company claims 2.5 million members internationally; in 2025 it marked 2025 growth of 103% and exited at the infamous ‘run rate’ metric of $1.1 billion. Their AI twist is around biometric data and how it is used to guide tracking and performance. It is heavily pitched to elite sports with famous athlete endorsers/investors such as soccer star Cristiano Rinaldo, basketball’s LeBron James, and golfer Rory McElroy.

The round was led by Collaborative Fund and includes global participation from a gang of investors including 2PointZero Group, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Mubadala Investment Company, Abbott, Mayo Clinic, Macquarie Capital (entities administered by Macquarie Capital), Glade Brook, B-Flexion, IVP, Foundry, Accomplice, Affinity Partners, Promus Ventures, and Bullhound Capital alongside a group of prominent global athletes and individual investors. The additional funds will be used for growth in the US plus international expansion across Europe, the GCC, Latin America, and Asia. The wonderfully subjective (by investors) metric of valuation stands at $10.1 billion. Total funding since 2012 is over $900 million.

WHOOP received the infamous Warning Letter from FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) in July 2025 regarding marketing claims for Blood Pressure Insights (BPI) on the basis that the company did not have an approved application for premarket approval (PMA) or 510(k) approval of that feature. The founder/CEO is contesting FDA as he believes that the feature is for general wellness purposes and is covered under the 21st Century Cures Act.  Mobihealthnews, WHOOP release

(In all honesty, this Editor had only vaguely heard of it, but her idea of a expensive watch usually has the name Elgin or Hamilton on the face and is usually antique (Omega too, sigh). In fitness watches, she thinks of Apple, Samsung, and the low-profile Withings (which makes traditionally styled smartwatches) but none of them have persuaded her to part with several hundred dollars.)

Anthropic buys a tiny bio research software developer for a stunning $400 million in stock. Coefficient Bio was founded only eight months ago and reportedly had only nine employees. It was so stealthy that it never got past the placeholder website. The amount was reported by its 50% owner, venture capital firm Dimension, which realized a hefty 38,513% IRR on the investment. Coefficient was working on AI models and software for biological research.  Apparently founder Samuel Stanton and his team will join Anthropic’s Health Care Life Sciences area. It’s interesting that Anthropic is building up their healthcare footprint after making their customized AI available to both consumers and clinicians, quite a contrast to OpenAI’s purchase of TPTN, a small podcaster of tech news and personalities (CNBC). HISTalk 4/6/26, Silicon Angle, Newcomer

Early stage companies also nabbed some decent fundings

Behavioral health therapy assistant Jimini Health raised $17 million in seed funding from M13, Town Hall Ventures, LionBird, Zetta Venture Partners, and OneMind, bringing total funding to more than $25 million. Their AI-forward (of course) Sage platform fills the niche left by fully remote telementalhealth companies in supporting large behavioral health provider organizations. NYC-based Jimini  promotes a clinician-supervised and controlled patient-facing, reimbursement-ready and compliant infrastructure with licensed clinicians maintaining oversight of every patient interaction. According to the release, the funding will be used to build partnerships with “several of the largest behavioral health provider organizations in the country and expand Sage’s clinical capabilities across comorbidities, care settings, and patient engagement modalities”. Release, Behavioral Health Business, Mobihealthnews

Insight Health’s $11 million Series A will be used to scale its agentic AI platform. The round was led by Standard Capital, with participation from Kindred Ventures, Pear VC, Eudemian, 43 and ElevenLabs. Insight Health uses AI to automate routine clinical and non-clinical tasks such as phone and front-desk coordination, referral and fax processing, pre-clinical intake, and clinical documentation. For instance their agents engage with patients directly via voice or text. Current customer base is in clinics. Their Aura AI Scribe and Virtual Care Assistant are available in athenahealth’s Marketplace. Their total funding is about $16 million. Release, Mobihealthnews

Short takes:

Noom buys 503A licensed pharmacy Tailor Made Compounding (TMC). The buy, according to Noom, will enable them to expand beyond weight loss GLP-1s further into the healthy aging segment, with longevity peptides, hormone replacement, and cosmetics. Noom has weathered several pivots, starting in 2008 with fitness apps, then added behavioral change with a weight-loss coaching app in 2017. It has pretty much settled into the lucrative e-prescribing and wellness ‘preventative care’ area targeting health plans and employers. TMC’s client base includes 400 clinics and multiple telehealth partners, which presumably Noom will let them maintain. Acquisition cost and staff transitions were not disclosed beyond integration ‘later this summer’.  Release, Mobihealthnews

‘IT’ clinical information search engine/AI chatbot OpenEvidence inks deal with NY’s Mount Sinai Health System. It is Mount Sinai’s first enterprise-wide AI deployment and integration across clinical roles, according to the health system’s announcement last week. It will be integrated into their Epic EHR. OpenEvidence, with a eyeblinking valuation of $12 billion [TTA 13 Feb], claims a daily average usage by 40% of US doctors in 10,000 hospitals and medical centers of their free search engine trained on journals and clinical medical data only. It fills a gap that competitors Doximity, Epocrates, and Medscape aren’t doing. It has added clinical trial matching to its capabilities filtering trials by study design, enrollment status, and geographic proximity. This adds on to Sutter Health’s integration into doctors’ Epic workflows announced earlier this year. Healthcare IT News