After five months of testing, iterating, spit balling and pavement pounding, today Rock Health’s fourth class of HealthTech startups took the stage at Demo Day to pitch their fledgling businesses to investors. More than anything, these fourteen startups confirmed that digital health is not just alive and well, but beginning to gain some real traction. (More on that here.)
Like education, the… → Read More
As CES 2013 gets underway, it finds the Quantified Self movement to be a far more crowded market than a year ago, but as Matt Burns pointed out recently, the market is still hungry for smarter devices and “plenty of room” remains for startups for startups to push the envelope with innovation and press beyond movement and weight.
With digital health data proliferating, wearable health-tracking… → Read More
Rock Health, the seed accelerator for startups focused on the health space, landed a big, new partner back in August: The well-known Silicon Valley venture firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The result of the new partnership? The promise of a considerably larger seed investment for its next batch of startups, as Kleiner joined Rock Health’s existing partners in offering $100K in seed… → Read More
As digital health data grows, wearable health-tracking devices mature, tools used in remote diagnosis and treatment improve and with healthcare providers soon to be prescribing mobile health apps, there’s a lot to be excited about at the intersection of health and technology. As Michelle Snyder of InterWest recently pointed out, thanks to the quickening pace of innovation in the space, it may not… → Read More
Back in June, Silicon Valley’s health-focused startup accelerator, Rock Health, kicked off its third program. What was notable about this third batch — other than the encouraging fact that a health-only accelerator has made it to its third batch (props also to Blueprint Health in NYC, now on its second) — was the promise of its future academic pedigree. That is to say, Rock Health co-founder… → Read More
Late last week, San Francisco and Boston-based healthtech accelerator Rock Health held demo day for its second batch of startups at Practice Fusion’s headquarters. The thirteen companies pitched their ideas for making healthcare cheaper, more social, intuitive, and just generally less of a pain in the ass. Even though these companies have a hard road ahead, there are ideas here that, with some… → Read More
Founded in the mobile microscopy lab at UC Berkeley, a young startup called CellScope is on a mission to turn your smart, mobile devices into a microscope, giving parents the ability to perform easy, at-home diagnoses.
The startup has been developing its first product for over a year now, adding functionality that will give consumers the ability to share images of the eardrum with remote… → Read More
Founded in 2009 by Scott Sangster and incubated in healthtech accelerator Rock Health’s inaugural batch, HealthInReach has been on a mission to combat the high cost of healthcare and put consumers back in control of their healthcare by creating a transparent online marketplace for comparing the quality and price of health providers and procedures. The startup has built a consumer-focused (or… → Read More
This first part of a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare focuses on the expansion of the venture business beyond traditional venture and large strategic investors. In the second part, I will outline the backdrop for the investment thesis that strategic healthcare investors are using to guide their capital allocation.
Healthcare providers are finding their “play it safe”… → Read More
Currently, the federal government is poised to level the playing field for healthtech startups. An unprecedented wave of innovative healthtech startups has been developing over the last few years. You can see them at conferences such as Health 2.0, TechCrunch Disrupt, TEDMED and demo day events that Blueprint Health, Healthbox, Rock Health and StartUp Health host. Nonetheless, the health sector… → Read More
Few people are satisfied with the current American healthcare system. It gets more expensive while innovations that actually improve the patient experience are rare. While there may be innovative new treatments and surgeries, basic functions like tracking health-related expenses or dealing with insurance companies to pay a hospital bill are still a pain.
Rock Health is an SF-based incubator for… → Read More
As Dave Chase wrote earlier this year, the healthtech space is heating up, and a lot of serial entrepreneurs with consumer web experience are turning their focus to fixing some of the big problems inherent in the legacy health systems we have today in the U.S. and abroad. Yet, in spite of the $1 billion pool VCs have poured into startups last year, for example, healthtech startups, specifically… → Read More
On Friday, Rock Health, the startup accelerator for health-focused startups, hosted its Demo Day at UCSF Mission Bay, where the 13 startups in its latest class introduced their businesses to 250 attendees, among them investors from Accel, NEA, Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Benchmark, Kapor Capital, SV Angel, The Social+Capital Partnership, Founders Fund and more.
The thirteen startups that… → Read More
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