Short takes: UK’s Cera raises $150M, $105M for Qventus, Solera Health’s $40M; General Catalyst’s AWS deal, Virta Health hits $100M in revenue, powered by GLP-1 maintenance; VirtuAlly’s JC telehealth accreditation

January 16, 2025 | by

A ‘this-n-that’ roundup, with a flurry of fundings and more.

Larger fundings are really swinging it this month, making it feel a little bit like old times:

Cera raises $150 million for UK/NHS expansion, platform AI development, and upscaling. The $150 million funding is split between equity and debt, via lead investors BDT & MSD Partners and Schroders Capitals, plus Earlymarket, Guinness Ventures, DigitalHealth, and Robin Klein, a private UK investors. Cera has raised a total of $407 million, with their last raise of $302 million in 2022. 

Cera supports a spectrum of in-home health through its proprietary AI-assisted carer platform. Their nurses and other staff carers use the app on phones (primarily) to direct care and monitor patients. AI and ML assists enable caregivers to view and react to changes in condition. Families can also view reporting on the app. The company claims results of daily savings of £1 million for the UK healthcare system, hospitalization reductions of up to 70%, a 20% reduction in patient falls, and hospital discharges that are up to five times faster. It supports an estimated 60,000 daily in-person healthcare visits across UK homes, partners with over 150 local governments, and two-thirds of NHS Integrated Care Systems. They also claim to be EBITDA positive (as of 2022) and free-cash-flow positive from last year. TechFundingNews, TechCrunch

Qventus raises $105 million in a Series D. The investment in the care operations and automation platform for over 115 health systems was led by KKR’s Next Generation Technology III Fund with Bessemer Venture Partners plus new strategic investors Northwestern Medicine, HonorHealth, and Allina Health. Qventus claims to be ‘AI-first’ for automating routine care and record tasks, increasing team productivity up to 50%. The new funding will be used to accelerate the development and commercialization of solutions powered by its AI Operational Assistants into new care settings beyond its Surgical Growth and Inpatient Capacity solutions. Total funding to date is $203 million over 10 rounds. Release, MedCityNews

A $40 million round for Solera Health gets them to a Series E. The insider round was co-led by payer group Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC). It also includes investors Adams Street, Cobalt Ventures, and Horizon Mutual Holdings, Inc. Funding to date totals $112 million. Solera’s HALO platform provides access to hundreds of digital health applications for payers and employers, including apps for virtual specialty care in areas such as hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes prevention, and weight management, to drive down the cost of care. Also announced was the confirmation of interim CEO John Santelli to the position. He joined Solera after nearly 30 years with UnitedHealth Group, departing as CIO. Release, MedCityNews

When giants meet…new AI models follow, with General Catalyst allying with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop AI tools for its portfolio companies. The focus will be on cloud services and generative AI using Amazon Bedrock, the ML application for building generative AI on AWS. This will be used for improving predictive analytics around patient treatment outcomes and insights into factors such as disease progression. Also mentioned are tools based on Anthropic and Mistral AI, along with securely trained health care-specific models. 

First up are the expanding Commure and Aidoc. Their specialized technology solutions like Copilot Suite and aiOS will be integrated with AWS’s AI and data capabilities. General Catalyst, besides investing in many healthcare and digital health companies, will be using this for their separate HATco, The Health Assurance Transformation Corporation. HATco was founded in October 2023 to develop an interoperability model for technology solutions, targeting health systems and payers. Mobihealthnews, Yahoo Finance/Global Data, FierceHealthcare

In the hot nexus of diabetes management and weight loss, Virta Health passed the $100 million in revenue threshold and growth of 60%. It’s remarkable given that Virta specializes in reversing Type 2 diabetes and obesity via nutrition modification and lifestyle changes. They’ve tweaked their approach into what happens after GLP-1 patients go off the drug, though they now manage GLP-1 prescribing for health plans, employers, and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). Their off-ramp is modeled after their Sustainable Weight Loss solution, Responsible Prescribing is designed as an alternative to GLP-1 drugs or as an off-ramp for patients moving off them to maintain their weight loss. Release

Virtual nursing provider VirtuAlly has received accreditation from The Joint Commission (JC). This relatively rare status for telehealth is based on continuous compliance with performance standards and commitment to providing safe and quality patient care. VirtuAlly provides 24/7 turnkey virtual nurse-patient monitoring, temporary virtual support, and consulting services. They also have added a new term to our lexicon, “tele-sitting”. Release 

Who needs Watson Health? 10 startups using AI (for real) in medical diagnostics, clinical decision making, and more

February 25, 2022 | by

Our Readers over the years (since 2012!) have been tracking the rise–and fall–of IBM Watson Health. Now sold to Francisco Health [TTA 22 Jan], multiple companies have taken up chunks of their all-too-unwieldy mission, from oncology analytics and diagnostics to clinical decision making, and managing (and, in one case, reversing) chronic conditions. MM+M (Medical Marketing and Media) profiled ten companies–5 in diagnosis and 5 in treatment–in two articles. The first five are closer to the original Watson than the second group.

  1. Heartflow–diagnosis of coronary artery disease
  2. PathAI–machine learning for pathology in bladder and skin cancer detection
  3. Paige.AI–AI and pathology in prostate cancer detection
  4. Exo–medical imaging
  5. Proscia–dermatology diagnosis for melanoma
  6. Atropos Health–converting EHR information for clinical decision making and follow up
  7. Virta Health–prescribing food plans to people to reverse Type 2 diabetes, management via AI to doctors
  8. Sword Health–virtual care for patients with musculoskeletal (MSK) pain, managed by pairing them with digital therapy, monitoring by motion sensors
  9. Omada Health–personal interventions in chronic conditions
  10. Twin Health–sensor based monitoring and machine learning to reverse chronic diseases

Part 1 and Part 2

Global deals roundup: bubbly Butterfly blank check, Imprivata-FairWarning, Virta Health, OTV, WithMe Health, Perfood, Sofía

December 4, 2020 | by

Christmas is definitely bubbly in the global tub, in the year-end rush to finalize those Big Deals and Corral That Cash.

‘Blank check’ acquisitions accelerate. The latest digital health SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) is hand-held ultrasound developer Butterfly Network with Longview Acquisition Corp. Longview, a SPAC sponsored by Glenview Capital Management, LLC, brings the listing on the NYSE, Butterfly brings the name and the tech. The deal is valued at $1.5 billion and is expected to have an estimated $584 million in cash after closing expected in Q1 next year. The combined company will trade under BFLY. Existing investors remain and will convert to common stock shareholders. Founder Dr. Jonathan Rothberg will be chairman and largest controlling shareholder. The company’s product is the Butterfly iQ+ hand-held ultrasound probe and mobile software. priced at $1,999 plus a ‘membership cost’ of a standard $99/year. Release This follows on last week’s three-way SPAC with GigCapital2 Inc., UpHealth Holdings, and Cloudbreak Health LLC [TTA 26 Nov].

Data security is hot too. Imprivata, which specializes in digital identity management for healthcare organizations to secure workflows and IT systems, just picked up the FairWarning Technologies insider threat prevention, patient privacy, and data security platform. FairWarning has worked with leading US health systems such as Mount Sinai Health System (NYC), Memorial Hermann (Houston), plus in the UK NHS Lothian and NHS Homerton. Not surprisingly as both companies are in the business of privacy, terms of the deal, timing, and leadership team were not disclosed. Healthcare IT News, Imprivata release.

Virta Health gained a healthy Series D with a $65 million raise, led by Sequoia Capital Global Equities. Virta now has a total funding of $231 million and now has joined the unicorns with a valuation of $1.1 bn. Virta’s treatment using remote patient coaching and carbohydrate dietary restriction reverses Type 2 diabetes, reducing A1C and eliminating the patient’s requirement for diabetes medications. Bloomberg, Virta release

Israel’s Olive Tree Ventures has rebranded itself as OTV and announced the closing of a $170 million fund with a total value of $170M. It is Israel’s first and only primarily digital health venture capital fund. Joining the company is a new Head of Asia Pacific, Jose Antonio Urrutia Rivas, for planned expansion into that market. Release

WithMe Health, an app-based personalized medication guidance company, raised $20 million in a Series B funding led by OMERS Ventures with existing investor Oak HC/FT and new investors Section 32, Shulman Ventures, and MTS Ventures. Release

In Germany, digital therapeutics startup Perfood GmbH raised a €5 million ($5.9 million) Series A to launch its first prescription therapeutics next year. Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund led the round, with UV-Cap and investiere. Their personalized nutrition products based on DNA sequencing and gut microbiomes are prescribed as alternatives or add-ons to conventional medications. Their first product available for prescription (in Germany only) will be sinCephalea for treating episodic migraine. MillionFriends is their weight management program based on coaching, gut microbiome analysis, and nutrition management. Mobihealthnews

And in Latin America, Sofía, a Mexico City-based telemedicine and insurance startup, gained a $19 million Series A funding, led by Index Ventures with Calvary Ventures, Kaszek Ventures, and Ribbit Capital. Started by three friends at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), the company launched with a COVID-19 related telemedicine service, grew quickly to 10,000 users, then moved into insurance, using a core group of 100 physicians in the D.F. in 70 different specialist areas. TechCrunch

Rounding up what’s news: LindaCare, TytoCare funding; Medicare telehealth parity, Norway’s big cyberhack, Virta reversing diabetes, DARPA’s 60th birthday

February 9, 2018 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Lasso.jpg” thumb_width=”100″ /]Your Editor’s been away and then largely out of pocket over the past two weeks. Here’s our roundup/catchup beyond the bombshells:

In remote patient monitoring for chronic disease, Philips, PMV, and other investors invested €7 million ($8.6 million) in Belgium’s/Hartford CT’s LindaCare. The Series B funding will accelerate its US expansion of OnePulse for remote monitoring of chronic heart failure and cardiac arrhythmia patients with Cardiac Implanted Electronic Devices (CIED). It is in use in major European hospitals and in US trials, though there is no mention in the release or on their website on CE Marking or FDA clearance/clinical trials. Previously from its 2013 founding, it had €1.6 million in funding. Also Mobihealthnews.

TytoCare, a remote monitoring telehealth/video consult platform which integrates peripherals for a virtual physical exam, raised $25 million in a Series C round led by large Chinese insurer Ping An via their Global Voyager Fund plus Walgreens, Fosun Group, OrbiMed, LionBird, and Cambia Health Solutions. Release. Their total raise is $45.6 million since 2012 (Crunchbase). Their most current partnership is with Long Island-based Allied Physicians Group which is featuring at-home telehealth visits at its pediatric practice in Plainview.

More favorable Medicare reimbursement for telehealth is the subject of four US Congressional bills. The one furthest along is the ‘Creating High-Quality Results and Outcomes Necessary to Improve Chronic Care Act of 2017’ (S.870), which aims to improve at-home care, increases Medicare Advantage flexibility, gives ACOs more options and expands telehealth capabilities for stroke and dialysis patients. It passed the Senate in September and now goes to the House Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. The effect of all four is on Medicare payment parity with in-office visits, which does not currently exist and is not affected by the various state parity bills on insurance for those below 65. American Well touts a 10-fold growth in revenue, but the likelihood of any of these four bills being signed into law is small, particularly with a pending report from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Becker’s Hospital Review

Norway released at end of January news on an “advanced and persistent” 8 January cyberattack on Health South East RHF. This has both a health breach and military twist.

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