Digital health start-ups raised a record $3.1 billion in Q1; focus will likely evolve from providers to consumers and employers

__

Dig­i­tal health firms raised record sums before Covid-19 hit (Med­C­i­ty News):

“Dig­i­tal Health star­tups raised a record-break­ing $3.1 bil­lion in the first quar­ter of 2020, accord­ing to a report released Mon­day by Rock Health. But now faced with a glob­al pan­dem­ic, the trend is unlike­ly to con­tin­ue…

Investors tend­ed to pre­fer high­er-val­ue, late-stage invest­ments, accord­ing to the report. The aver­age deal sized jumped from $19.5 mil­lion last year to $29 mil­lion, and near­ly a third of the deals were series C or lat­er … Inter­est­ing­ly, the major­i­ty of star­tups that raised fund­ing focused on health­care providers as their buy­er or end user. Fac­ing sub­stan­tial finan­cial hits from the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, health sys­tems may become more dif­fi­cult to sell to in the future.

Of the deals that Rock Health tracked, 68 focused on the providers as the buy­er, while 41 were mar­ket­ed to con­sumers and 18 to employ­ers.”

About Rock Health:

Rock Health is a ven­ture fund that invests exclu­sive­ly in dig­i­tal health. Port­fo­lio invest­ments include Oma­da Health, Col­lec­tive Health, Vir­ta, Doc­tor on Demand, Bench­ling, and oth­er soft­ware-dri­ven health­care solu­tions that low­er cost and improve out­comes to make health­care mas­sive­ly bet­ter for every human being.

News in Context:

• Info­graph­ic on the Dig­i­tal Brain Health Mar­ket 2012–2020
• Jeff Bezos invests in dig­i­tal men­tal health pio­neer Mind­strong Health
• Med­i­ta­tion app Head­space rais­es $93 mil­lion in equi­ty and debt to accel­er­ate clin­i­cal val­i­da­tion and geo­graph­ic expan­sion
• Five rea­sons the future of brain enhance­ment is dig­i­tal, per­va­sive and (hope­ful­ly) bright
• The FDA cre­ates new Dig­i­tal Health unit to reimag­ine reg­u­la­to­ry paths in the age of scal­able, AI-enhanced inno­va­tion
• Ten neu­rotech­nolo­gies about to trans­form brain enhance­ment & health