⛑ Special Edition: HealthTech... The Seed #10
🌱 Welcome to the tenth issue of the Seed and welcome to our new subscribers!
⚙️The Seed is a weekly newsletter with easy-to-read content focusing on Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology. Our slogan: "Growing ideas through seeds of information"
🚨This week’s big news: The Seed releases its second special edition on the HealthTech industry!
💡 This week’s concepts
Healthcare is a sector that will be undergoing serious changes in the next decade. Technologies such as AI are now part of the medical universe and will contribute to its drastic transformation.
❓What does HealthTech stand for?
HealthTech includes any healthcare product or service that can be delivered or consumed outside of a hospital or physician’s office. Actually, HealthTech is focused on the optimization of personal and preventive care.
One example is Oscar, an HealthTech company which provides various insurance plans for individuals, family, and employees while offering virtual care, doctor support and appointments scheduling.
😷 Okay Doc, but we like numbers!
Do you want some numbers? Here they are and they should give you an idea of this promising industry.
$1,000 billion: estimated HealthTech market
$15.3 billion: amount raised by HealthTech companies in 2020 (60% Year-over-Year growth)
626: Number of active HealthTech companies in Europe (63% founded after 2015)
2,000+: Number of HealthTech companies in North America
⭐ Current trends
Like HealthTech is just a part (even if it's the largest) of the healthcare sector, the industry is composed of several segments... and some are particularly blooming.
The largest is 'Screening & Diagnostics tools'. There, companies are aiming to give you analytics about your current state of health. But the two segments I'd recommend looking at and that are extremely followed by investors are women's health and mental health.
The first has seen in 2020 a 100% growth in fundings compared to 2019. The second has seen an impressive growing number of startups since the pandemic began (+38% from December 2019 to December 2020).
📈 News and Trends
Some news
💬 Microsoft to Acquire Nuance $19.7B
Following their 2020 announcement of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Nuance: a pioneer startup that provides conversational AI for Healthcare Providers. This announcement confirms the Tech Giant's interest in HealthTech when the sector continues to thrive.
🏥 Docosan, a Vietnamese Healthcare booking app, raised $1M in Seed.
Docosan is an app that allows patients to search and book doctors online. Since its creation last year, the company has helped over 50,000 patients and more than 300 physicians are registered on the platform.
🚨 Interlude: Coinbase, went public and it went well…
Though this newsletter is dedicated to HealthTech, we couldn’t miss that. Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange platform went public this week, with a valuation of $85 billion at the end of the opening day. As a comparison, Facebook ended at $82 billion!
Trends - Telehealth on the rise
💻 What is Telehealth, and why is it trendy?
Made even more popular by the COVID pandemic, Telehealth is the branch of HealthTech that aims at providing health-related information via the Internet (or other distant communication). Telehealth also includes Telemedicine, which focuses on delivering care remotely.
In addition to being practical for patients living in rural areas where there is often a physician shortage, Telehealth offers a few advantages that make it promising:
Allows for an improved monitoring
Lower visit times for physicians and patients. Physicians have reported an average of 20% reduction in visit times when using Telemedicine.
Increases physicians’ revenues and reduces costs for patients (e.g., travel costs).
🩺 Famous Telehealth companies
Here are 3 promising Telehealth companies:
Teladoc Health is an American publicly traded company that provides a platform for virtual care services, including Chronic Care Management, Mental Health Services, or more traditional Telemedicine. In 2020, Teladoc reported an annual revenue of $1.1 billion, almost twice as much as its 2019 revenue.
Amwell is another major American Telehealth company, directly competing with Teladoc. It made its IPO last September, after raising $811 million. It has recently been ranked first in a US customer satisfaction survey for telehealth services.
Heal is a startup created in 2014, that tries to adapt Uber's business model to Telehealth. With this application, you can request an appointment with a doctor in less than an hour! To date, the company has raised more than $160 million.
Currently, most Telehealth solutions are focused on putting physicians and patients in touch. However, in the future, it is likely that with the development of Artificial Emotional Intelligence (see our newsletter #8!), some robots will replace physicians! Will we soon be treated only by robots?
❤️ Weekly Crush
As we’ve mentioned in a previous newsletter, the FemTech sector is gaining more and more importance - as women's health issues are still under-considered nowadays. A recent example: Nabla. Here’s what you need to know about it.
∇ Nabla
Nabla is a French startup founded by Alexandre Lebrun in 2018 which has just raised 17 million euros.
It is a free application dedicated to women's health, and the idea is to best support women's health by providing personalized medicine based on Machine Learning via an app.
⚙️ How does it work?
Women can ask their questions directly to practitioners for free, consult content and save doctor's advice in a personalized library, and record their symptoms. They can also anonymously share what works for them to advance research.
We invite you to visit its website if you are curious about Nabla!
🔎 Focus
🦠 Healthtech against COVID-19
How could we talk about Healthtech without talking about the recent health crisis that has affected the whole planet?
Indeed, although all the health and public authorities have taken the crisis in charge, and big names like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson are in the media, younger companies have also participated in the fight against the crisis, that's what we will address in this Focus.
🤷♀️Why startups?
HealthTech companies have agility and adaptability, specific to their size and method of innovation, which allow them to respond more quickly to problems as specific as those of a health crisis, where some large laboratories have structural brakes.
🗺 How did they help? A mapping
The response to COVID-19 by startups is very diverse, going from virus detection to the proposal of vaccines through the support of patients, and our idea is to go through the panorama of solutions that they have delivered.
📞 At first, in order not to overload doctors, Telemedicine solutions have multiplied and have become alternatives to limit contact cases and to have access to testing spaces in an easy way. E.g., the French unicorn Doctolib thus proposed appointments to pass PCR tests. This solution proved to be successful internationally, MediBuddy an Indian startup offered the same solution to millions of users.
🧪 Secondly, the tests were particularly constraining and time-consuming, so many startups proposed alternatives to detect the virus: Nanoscent, an Israeli startup created that detects the virus in 30 seconds.
👨⚕️ Beyond the detection of the virus, the support of severely affected people was also important, and American startups have developed many solutions for ventilations such as Acubreath for emergency respiratory aids or Liberate Medical against muscle atrophy.
🖥️ Finally, creating a vaccine is a long process, and some startups have made their supercomputers available to facilitate the modeling of molecules and thus the research, such as Genci a French startup specialized in research.
In this article, we mainly talk about how HealthTech has participated in the effort to fight against COVID-19, but the whole ecosystem has mobilized to propose solutions for online meetings and courses, to track down contact cases, to shop online, or to prevent isolation.
That’s it for this week! Hope you enjoyed it and see you next Friday 🙌
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