Mapping A.I. in Healthcare: Early Stage Startups VCs Should Keep An Eye On

Healthcare has the highest number of VC-backed artificial intelligence startups

  1. Data Analytics: Applying machine learning on the massive amount of medical data from healthcare providers and insurers to find new patterns between symptoms and diseases
  2. Drug Discovery: Applying machine learning to the research in academia as well as known chemical characteristics to find new candidates for new drugs, find patients for trials, etc.
  3. Diagnostics: Use machine learning to categorize symptoms, lab results, medical images, etc. to diagnose the diseases
  4. Administrative: Over 30% of the healthcare costs in the U.S. is associated with administrative tasks such as insurance claims, insurance pre-authorization, going after unpaid bills, negotiations between insurers and providers, appointments, record keeping, etc.
  5. Virtual Doctor/Nurse: Use A.I. to gather your symptoms and vital signs, pre-diagnose you and maybe refer you to a specialist and reduce the hospital visits.
  6. Lifestyle: Better nutrition and an active lifestyle will lead to a huge cut on healthcare costs, let chatbots inspire you to live healthier.
  7. Mental Health: Hundreds of millions of people suffer from some form of mental illness, moderate or severe, and many of them simply do not know of their illness or do not want to/cannot afford to see a psychiatrist. Chatbots may help to find patterns in the way they talk, react and pre-diagnose them or help them with treatment.

I screened more than 200 companies in the A.I. Healthcare space (thanks to CB Insights, Crunchbase Pro, YCombinator, and other sources) and filtered out the ones that:

  1. Raised Less than $10M in Total Funding
  2. Are Headquartered in the U.S.
  3. Are Active (and Not Acquired) Based on Social Media, Hiring, etc.
If you want to have access to the list and scores of startups, please get in touch and I will share it with you.
  1. Customers have a real problem? (Product/Market Fit Risk)
  2. Lots of people have this problem? (Market Size)
  3. Healthy competition? (low score if no competition or competition from established companies or many other startups, high score if there are some players but not very strong or exactly focused on that customer segment)
  4. High barrier to entry? (Is the technology based on hooking existing solutions together or requires building something from the ground up)
  5. The solution can make a profitable business? (Business model is scalable? Is the correct part of the funnel? Can take a large pie?)
  6. Traction? (Sales, Pilots, Partnerships, Media Coverage)
  7. Is the timing right? (Why now? what technological advancement or market shift makes it the right time?)
  8. Is the team capable? (I looked into the LinkedIn profiles of all the employees of all these 70 startups. Main things I look for: experience running a previous startup, experience working in the same field or in the companies they want to disrupt, etc.)
  9. Current Investors? (Good investors currently on-board means they can risk further funding)

Top Angel-Funded Startups:

1 — Billion to One (Score=436): Prenatal Genetics Testing Using Blood Test

From Billion To One’s Website

Top Seed-Funded Startups

1 — Athelas (Score=660): Rapid at-home Blood Test Diagnostics

Top Series-A Funded Startups

1 — Qrativ (Score=543): Drug Discovery For Rare Diseases

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Partner at DCVC ($4Bn VC firm) and author of “Super Founders”. #1 bestseller new release VC book on Amazon. https://getbook.at/superfounders

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Ali Tamaseb

Partner at DCVC ($4Bn VC firm) and author of “Super Founders”. #1 bestseller new release VC book on Amazon. https://getbook.at/superfounders