Those of you who know about Silicon Roundabout know that our community gets excited about disruptive early stage startups that bring along new technology. We’re not talking about merely repurposing existing platforms, but technologies that are genuinely trying to solve the big problems that plague our industries. We just recently hosted an online community event that spotlighted exciting new ideas in Healthcare.
Growth Areas in Health Tech
Our main guest speakers for the event, a co-founder of Luminous Ventures and VC investor, Lomax Ward, discussed a few areas that were very promising and that were drawing significant interest from investors.
- Telehealth. Prompted by the current pandemic, there has been a boom in what Max calls Telehealth 1.0, which he describes as the more basic aspects of the remote deployment of healthcare using existing communication technologies. What interests him, though, is to see the emergence of Telehealth 2.0, which he defines as new technologies that enable more distributed service and delivery of healthcare.
- Data has become a hot topic in the industry. More and more startups are tackling the challenge of data access and data pooling in the healthcare industry. “The problem has not yet been figured out yet,” he says, and this offers many opportunities for these startups.
- There is also growing interest in evidence-based prescribed digital therapies, especially in the ability to distribute treatment through an app, rather than through conventional drugs. “Digital therapy is not just all about treating patients. There’s also an adherence angle to it, as well.”
- “Diagnostics is hard because it’s never clear the way you’ll get paid,” according to Max. But he thinks that with more advanced machine learning, it will be possible to address this problem. And there are a few strong startups in this arena as well.
- There are also several startups addressing the prohibitive costs of drug discovery, which remains a big challenge for the industry. Max also points out that there are many things going on in this area, particularly in automation and augmentation. And, of course, cell and gene therapy continue to be exciting prospects.
Max ended by sharing some thoughts on what VCs look for when considering healthcare startups. He says the composition of the team is important. Having the right founder-market fit and having the right experience in handling the problem the startup is trying to solve are especially crucial to the startup’s chances for getting funded, and for future success. It’s also crucial that the startup “know what they don’t know” and know how they are going to fill those gaps in.
Startups must be clear about what the main metrics are. At this stage, revenue is often not the main measure yet. Non-financial metrics are often more important at this stage.
Startup Pitches
We had 4 startups pitch their companies and products: Inavya Ventures, Arete, Careful, and Vecotech.
Inavya
Michael Wilkinson, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Inavya Ventures, introduced Avatr, an AI-driven healthcare app focused on “lifestyle” diseases. It lets patients create and manage a virtual replica of themselves so that doctors can more accurately and efficiently provide actionable decisions to help them stay well, even outside the hospital.
Arete
Next up was Dr. Graeham Douglas, founder and CEO of Arete Medical Technologies. Arete produce hardware and software to manage chronic respiratory diseases. Respicorder is a device that sits on the bedside table of people with severe respiratory issues. Alongside its partner app, the device predicts and prevents aggravation of the patient’s condition through treatment targeting.
Careful
Dr. DJ Hamblin-Brown is the founder of Careful, an online platform designed by clinicians to help doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals share and protect critical patient information and improve patient care. The system is focused on efficiently handing over actions and care plans. It seeks to eliminate ineffective hospital communication that leads to poor patient management and wasted resources.
Vecotech
Rounding up the startup pitches was Vecotech’s CEO, Professor Elena Lurie-Luke. Vecotech is a research and development company that pushes early-stage public healthcare concepts to commercialization. This startup bridges the gap between world-leading expertise and the world’s need for effective tools against medically important insects.
Inspiring Future Entrepreneurs: Leaving it All to Launch a Startup
Most of the people who go on to launch successful startups are industry professionals or upset customers who decide to act on problems and flows in their industry and develop solutions to address them. Leaving it all to start an uncertain journey, though, is not an easy feat. A case-in-point was our other guest speaker, Dr. Cristina Esteban of Apollonya Dental.
Cristina started up her venture as a response to the changes imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The health crisis forced dental clinics, just like all other business establishments, to close their doors to patients while the virus raged. To overcome this new constraint, Cristina took a cue from other industries that had been disrupted by mobile web applications and came up with the concept for her startup.
Apollonya Dental is an online platform that connects patients with their dental services provider. According to Cristina, the app is essentially your dentist on your phone. It is the future of dentistry, redefining the industry in response to the needs of the moment. She said, “We need to upgrade and change the way we perceive and have consultations with our patients.”
Cristina never did a startup nor worked in tech before but was given the opportunity in early 2020 to be mentored by the Silicon Roundabout team and has gone on to launch her beta trial. She is looking for beta testers to have a peek at the app for free, so you might want to check that out!
Fostering Entrepreneurship
We are seeing some new and exciting directions being taken in Health Tech. The key point is that these innovations are happening in an industry that is notoriously resistant to paradigm shifts and ferociously protective of data that could accelerate development if it were made available.
More significantly, these initiatives are being taken by industry practitioners themselves who recognise the opportunities in addressing problem areas using technology that is available to us now.
As Lomax Ward earlier pointed out, we’re not just seeing old technology being repurposed, but we are seeing new technologies being applied to present challenges.
This, in essence, is entrepreneurship.