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

April 9, 2026 | by

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

The last news roundup for 2019: ACA mandate unconstitutional, more $ for health research, PartnersHealthcare rebrands, Hackensack Meridian pays ransom, breaches>heart attack deaths, telepsychiatry merger, more

December 19, 2019 | by

Well, it’s happy trails for 2019, until we meet again in 2020, paraphrasing a well-known Roy Rogers tune (Roy was a movie and TV cowboy singer in the US; his eponymous roast beef sandwich chain was an advertising client for one of this Editor’s first jobs). So we’ll round up the news as we and I trust most of our Readers will be off for most of the next two weeks to be observing the holidays with family, friends, de-stressing, defrosting, or attempting to catch up on work while it’s quiet before January Madness hits. It’s hard to believe that This Year of Grace is almost over.

Breaking News: In a somewhat split decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday evening that the (Un) Affordable Care Act’s (ACA)’s individual insurance mandate, compelling everyone to signup Or Else, is unconstitutional. Congress zeroed out the mandate charge in 2018’s tax law. A decision regarding severability of the mandate from the ACA law has been remanded to the District Court. FierceHealthcare, Healthcare Dive

Also here in the US, we have both an impeachment of a President (a House action which will fail utterly in the Senate, and regarded by ordinary folks as a political annoyance) and a Federal budget running out on Friday that hardly anyone notices because it’s been extended since October by two continuing resolutions (CRs). The new budget that has to be signed by President Trump on Friday is, according to this POLITICO report today, chock full of health research dollars for NIH, the All Of Us genomics initiative directed by Eric Dishman, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, or PCORI. and more. There’s some coal dust in the stocking for the national patient identifier initiative. Separately, CMS’ Blue Button 2.0 is offline due to a bug.

PartnersHealthCare rebranding, investing $100 million. Now called Mass General Brigham to better align with its parents (Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Boston Globe reported that MGB will be spending $100 million for the first 18 months of a digital health initiative to improve the patient experience and the efficiency of care. Much will be around patient convenience, for example the ability to book appointments online, communicate with care providers via video and text, and providing online access to their medical records through OpenNotes. Efficiency initiatives will be focused on analytics and AI to manage patient flow and track revenue. The strategic plan and rebranding is promoted as a five-year project. Partners has been a pioneer in the field, with other large health systems following such as Novant Health (NC) and Mount Sinai (NY) with innovative partnerships and investments. FierceHealthcare

Hackermania in Hackensack continues. TTA reported last week that local New Jersey media identified Hackensack Meridian Health had been the victim of a ransomware attack starting on 5 December. The health system confirmed on Friday that it was a ransomware attack and they paid an undisclosed sum covered by insurance. The attack forced them back to paper records in all 17 of their hospitals, so with the insurance–and against law enforcement advice–they decided to pay up. Asbury Park Press, Healthcare IT News,Health IT Securitywhich also mentions the November attack on Oahu (Hawaii) Cancer Center. International hacker and ransomware attacks on vulnerable healthcare organizations are the subject of these year-end roundups: CISOMag, Becker’s Hospital Review.

Cyberbreaches increase fatal heart attacks? A Vanderbilt University study has also traced an uptick in patient mortality after heart attack to delayed care due to breaches. A survey of 3,000 Medicare-certified hospitals, about 10 percent of which had experienced a data breach, led to 36 additional deaths per 10,000 heart attacks. Krebs On Security blog

Short takes: the Sutter Health-Aetna partnership is adding home visits via Heal and telemedicine via 98point6 in Sutter’s Northern California area….Medtronic snapped up eating behavioral health startup Klue to reinforce a hybrid closed loop system to simplify diabetes management….Telepsychiatry is still niche, but InSight Telepsychiatry and Regroup Telehealth, two of the larger companies in the field, agreed to combine to be the single largest with a few hundred centers. Both American Well and Teladoc are encroaching on this area. 

We wish our Readers a Festive Holiday Season, whether you celebrate the week of Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or

another holiday. Rest, reflect, and our best wishes for a happy, healthy New Year. We will be off except for perhaps an occasional article until after 2 January.

 

Can Google Glass’ enterprise iteration solve the patient documentation crisis?

July 24, 2017 | by

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Glass-EE.jpg” thumb_width=”200″ /]”Glass is a hands-free device, for hands-on workers.” What a marketing position! Google Glass finally arrives at where it should have started–not a techie toy or a social snooper banned from bars, but a tool for specific work needs that solve specific but important problems. This is not only ‘on trend’, but also the ‘professional case’ is steak on the grill as a powerful way to lend legitimacy to a new product (the classic is Tang ‘orange drink’ going into space in the early ’60s). The recent announcement of Glass Enterprise Edition (EE) marking its emergence from stealth mode was a refreshingly low-key (for Google and parent Alphabet) surprise. Even the revamped look is sturdy and utilitarian in full glass mode (left) or in clip-on (and also serves as eye protection). 

Their on-trend position for healthcare is to reduce the amount of time that doctors spend charting and documenting patients. Augmedix, a Glass partner, built the documentation automation platform for Sutter Health and for Dignity Health that captures the information from the interaction between patient and doctor via a ‘remote scribe’. Jay Kothari, the Glass project lead, quotes data from Dignity that it reduces clinician daily documentation time from 33 percent to less than 10 percent,  The Sutter Health estimate is two hours per day. Out of the gate this is extremely valuable because it improves the clinician-patient face-to-face (and presumably virtual) visit in eye contact, reduces the break in taking notes, and reduces time pressure generated by post-visit review. Netherlands-based swyMed concentrates on facilitating virtual visits, and is testing a home visit pilot with Loyola University Health System practitioners in Maywood, Illinois. Others, like John Nosta, have been continuing to use Glass in business. Our Readers may want to check out these partners as that is how Google is making the Glass available, not directly. SF/Boston-based partner Brain Power wasn’t mentioned in Mr. Kothari’s blog, but their AI/VR applications for brain conditions such as autism and TBI, as well as other uses such as clinical trials and care for older adults. mHealthIntelligence interviewed Augmedix’s CEO Ian Shakil, who notes that Glass still needs improvements in battery life for the hard work of documenting patient visits.

Update: An interesting comment on this via Twitter. The paper is from 2015 but the regulatory and privacy questions around recording patients and information remain. Augmedix does state on its website that it is HIPAA compliant.

 
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Glass-Twitter.jpg” thumb_width=”250″ /]

Tracking ER ‘frequent flyers’ community-wide to coordinate care, reduce readmissions

June 29, 2016 | by

“There are folks who have a life of going from emergency department to emergency department, and that’s how their day is spent,” said Sorrell, an emergency physician and administrator at Sutter Health. “It’s sad and tragic, but that’s what happens.”

Alameda County,  just south of San Francisco, spans both wealth (Berkeley)- and poverty-stricken (Oakland) – parts of California. What it has a lot of as well are ER (ED) ‘frequent flyers’ a/k/a ‘super-users’. Some can’t manage their chronic conditions, while others are looking for a meal, a warm bed, safety or human contact. What is also true is that 1) this is an expensive and largely unnecessary form of medicine and social care, 2) there’s a lot of duplicated resources being utilized which are needed elsewhere and 3) the patients aren’t receiving the right sort of care for a better quality of life.

Since a data sharing program, PreManageED, was implemented on 31 March in four Sutter Health hospitals and two Alameda Health System hospitals, two hospitals found that they shared more than 2,000 patients, with over one-third having 6+ visits to the ER in the past year. But this is more than duplicate procedures, multiple EMS calls and badly coordinated care resulting in Medicare or Medicaid penalties. The Alameda hospitals are also integrating local community clinics and social services organizations into PreManageED so they receive alerts from the hospitals when their patients/clients arrive in the ER. It turns out that many patients are receiving social services from multiple agencies–also duplicated and uncoordinated. There is an example here of a mentally ill patient who visited ERs over 900 times in three years. Over 24 separate people had provided her with medical, emergency and social services–and none of them knew what the other was doing. The Alameda County program is a step to bring these ‘frequent flyers’ down to earth and improve their outcomes. Kaiser Health News

Big data in heart failure detection gets $2 million grant

October 11, 2013 | by

One part of the US government that hasn’t gone silent is the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which announced yesterday a $2 million research grant to IBM, Sutter Health and Geisinger Health System to jointly develop data analytics tools to help primary care physicians detect heart failure sooner. This will analyze EHR data to determine the patterns that may be indicative of a person at high risk–and investigate more effective early intervention. Big data sets sights on heart disease (HealthcareITNews)