MobiHealthNews’ investment series will highlight various stakeholders’ viewpoints on the current landscape of digital health investment and how companies should approach investors and navigate funding opportunities. The following is part one of an eight-part series:
Digital health startups in the U.S. raised $5.7 billion across 266 deals in the first half of 2024, and investment in the sector is on track to surpass year-end totals seen in 2019 and 2023, two years comparable to periods outside the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, many startups are striving to understand the best way to garner funding in the sector.
Daisy Wolf, investing partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss the types of technology making the biggest impact in healthcare and how founders should approach investors.
MobiHealthNews: How do you see the digital health landscape currently unfolding?
Daisy Wolf: The health tech landscape is really exciting and promising right now. We’re seeing new companies get founded every day with really promising founders who have decided now is the moment to take the leap in that there is a lot of potential for impact. And we have a huge array of founders that we’ve been working with for a number of years. We feel the landscape is in a pretty positive place.
MHN: Some individuals say we’re in an AI bubble where almost every company touts its use of AI, but some models are less robust than others and, therefore, could be harmful to patients. Do you see the majority of digital health companies headed in the right direction, especially in regard to AI implementation and utilization?
Wolf: I think we’re at a really exciting time. The reality with startups is that the vast majority of startups fail, whether they are AI startups or not. That is the truth of venture. But I think that this is a great time to found a company.
There’s a lot of exciting things about AI in healthcare. One way we’ve been thinking about it is that healthcare is a fifth of the economy and it’s the last part of the economy that has really yet to be infiltrated and changed by technology.
We, as patients and consumers, experience that pain every single day when we’re asked to fill out the same form we filled out 100 times at the doctor’s office, when we can’t get an answer, when our data sits between, like, 17 different doctor’s offices that we’ve visited in our lifetime that don’t speak to each other.
The industry is the last industry that has call centers of people who are faxing and answering phones and scheduling appointments manually.
If you look at the developing world, it went straight from cash and mobile payments and leapfrogged over credit cards. We see that opportunity happening in healthcare right now, where we’re going to go straight from humans to AI and leapfrogging over traditional enterprise SaaS.
And so companies don’t have to go to these overburdened IT teams and overworked doctors who do not want to be trained on…
Read More: State of digital health investment, part 1: Andreessen Horowitz
