#234 - Ex-Gorillas in the Mist
The one-minute healthtech roundup, brought to you by SomX.
Hi friends,
This week: Cera expands with a national NHS partnership, XUND and Heidi raise funds, and Sofinnova warms up €1.2B for life sciences companies.
Your friends all listen to podcasts. Be interesting at your next dinner party by listening to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Amy and Huw from SomX break down the best stories from this week’s newsletter, with the help of Firstword Healthtech’s Tina Tan. Available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
News Bites 🥪
❌ HealthTech Scale-up XUND Secures €6M in Pre-Series A Funding – Clinical assessment, decision support and triage is the name of the game this week as XUND gets a big cash boost to take on the UK market. Pigeon’ll warn you: it’s getting crowded in here.
🦍 Gorillas founder raises cash for stealth healthtech venture despite product delays – We’ll admit: Neko Health’s remarkable success to date had Pigeon overcome our aversion to the idea of tech founders from outside healthcare waltzing into health looking to break something, so we’ll go easy on Kağan Sümer for now. That said, if the body-scanner-turned-blood-testing-now-social-media-app pivots any further, it’ll be right back where it started.
💰 Health tech platform Heidi raises $25.7m as clinicians drive take-up to a million sessions a week – Aussie Ambient AI Heidi is getting a lot right recently (including its UK go-to-market: first it wasn’t anyway, then, suddenly it was everywhere). It's a journey investors seem keen to get behind, as this fairly chunky raise proves.
🔮 AI predicts hospital stay lengths for people with learning disabilities – Sure researchers need to get more original with their project names (this isn’t the first DECODE Pigeon’s featured in recent weeks), but its hard not to be impressed by both the technology and its potential impact on patient care and resource planning.
🍂 NHS ups AI push with Cera software rollout for fall prediction – Cera, already a unicorn and with a claim to being the biggest UK healthtech startup, has hit another milestone, as it's rolled out nationally by the NHS to support out-of-hospital care.
💸 Sofinnova has €1.2B to invest in up to 60 new life sciences firms – Form an orderly queue, founders. Biotechs, medtechs and digital health will welcome one of the most significant announcements of new capital investment in years. Sadly, detail of how it will be deployed is thin on the ground, so patience remains a virtue, for now.
👍 Rune Labs' AI coaching tool aims to offer care continuity to people with Parkinson's – Fresh off last week’s news of a treatment for anxiety experienced by those living with Parkinson’s, a new app from Rune Labs may also help manage symptoms and predict risk. Along with monitoring, the app also relies on LLM coaching.
3️⃣ Wes Streeting’s three-point plan could rescue the NHS. The problem is getting citizens to accept it – For healthcare as an industry, ‘prevention, digitisation and community care’ is basically a mantra. But Pigeon would be the first to admit we’re not super in touch with the man on the street (we fly everywhere after all), and it’s possible, for one reason or another, they don’t really want anything to do with it.
🦄 Unicorn Flo Health eyeing startup acquisitions following $200m fundraise – When you’ve hit unicorn status, what’s three letters come next? No, not IPO, M&A [Is an ampersand a letter? - Ed.]. It’s something Pigeon’s quietly calling the Huma route, and we’re excited to see which companies could be in Flo Health’s sights in the coming months.
🧠 MYndspan and MEGIN Partner to Make MEG Brain Scans More Accessible – Been itching to get your brain scanned? This one’s for you. The partnership will see magnetoencephalography technology finally accessible to the consumer, alongside all the clinical insights it can bring.
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
Fund Your Innovation: Healthtech Grant Funding Workshop with Fabricio Chavarro, Partner at Otravista Consulting LLP
🕣 March 11
📍 Online
The Impact of Obesity: Learning from Lived Experience
🕣 March 12
📍 Online
BMJ Future Health webinar: Bringing AI to life in the NHS: Insights from successful implementation
🕣 March 14
📍Online
WIRED Health
🕣 March 18
📍 London
Digital Health Rewired
🕣 March 18 - 19
📍 Birmingham
Start Summit, St Gallen
🕣 March 20 - 21
📍 Switzerland
Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup to see all of the best upcoming healthtech, biotech and healthcare events.
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🤔 Consultant, Public Health Solutions, Operations Industry & Domain Solutions, Technology & Transformation – We’d argue this job title is so long we don’t need to describe it, but its an exciting role for an EPR/digital transformation expert with a history of working with the NHS..
🧐 Senior Analyst - Healthcare Strategy Consulting, Princeton Biopartners – A role for a strategic mind in a company supporting life sciences businesses to up their game wherever possible. Who could say no?
📈 Founding Ecommerce Manager, Clearer Healthtech – A fast growing health and wellness company with a research-backed eye health supplement is looking for an e-commerce expert to own and grow the business from the ground up. Sound like you?
Got news, jobs or events you think is worth coo-ing over? Let us know! Email us: news@healthtechpigeon.com
Healthtech Pigeon is curated and produced by SomX, the communications and creative agency for healthcare. We are clinicians, scientists, creatives and communicators dedicated to serving our healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector clients with services across strategy, content, PR, design, events and media production. Get in touch to learn more.