Arel Meister - Aldama

Another large funding round in the virtual behavioral health space. It's interesting to note Talkiatry's focus on a physician-centric care model with W-2 providers, as opposed to most of the other players who are delivering care with 1099 mid-level therapists. However, it's still not clear to me how they are measuring care quality and outcomes, which is the foundation of true value-based care.

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Excited to be getting my full-body MRI this week with Prenuvo in New York. It’s interesting to see how controversial this is. Some feel that having access to too much information—eg the ability to detect hundreds of conditions very early, although some of them won’t develop further—can lead to unnecessary worry. I find it surprising that many health experts recommend waiting for symptoms, risk factors, or family history before acting. Why is it better to act only when you are sick? Wouldn’t it be better to predict that you are more likely to get sick so you can act on? Critics often raise concerns about stress from false positives and the burden they place on the healthcare system with additional follow-up tests. I get that. But personally, I’d rather deal with a false positive than miss an opportunity to be proactive about my health. I even know someone who caught cancer early thanks to Prenuvo, which gave him the chance to act before it was too late. Prevention and early detection are key. https://lnkd.in/d7G4RM27

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TL;DR: Solving a fundamental point of friction in US health care: affordability The LEAD team is excited to back The WiTT Group and Rahul Mahadevan in their latest financing round led by Sopris Capital to expand their impact efforts of distributing non-clinical support to patients more efficiently! "Financial toxicity for patients undergoing treatment in the U.S. healthcare system is a critical issue that needs urgent attention. What excites us about backing WiTT is its platform's unique ability to align incentives across key stakeholders and support patients in need in the community. It efficiently delivers financial and non-financial assistance to patients, driving improved treatment compliance for healthcare providers. We're excited to support their commercial expansion as they grow the most valuable, proprietary patient dataset focused on self-reported social determinants of health." CC: Thomas H. Rudy Kaiwen Liu Matthew Foran Sopris Capital Taylor Paul Abinav Sankar Charlie Regis Kendel Fiorentino

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Clinical model development is critical to not only delivering good healthcare but also for setting up your business model for long term success. Our next office hours host is one of the best. Thanks Eva Luo for sharing your advice with founders! #vivecollective

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Still feeling energized from last week's roundtable on building successful relationships with hospitals. We invited 7 portfolio companies and health system leaders from Mayo Clinic, Cedars-Sinai and UCLA Health. The founders shared their questions ranging from the strategic to the nuts and bolts of closing partnerships. For example, how do you determine what measures of effectiveness help drive alignment? And how do you get all the stakeholders together to actually drive a decision. Answer: put them all in a room for half a day! “I think we're in a pivotal moment regarding how we assess AI. There are numerous risks currently dominating AI discussions, particularly those concerning bias and other associated risks. However, there's a notable absence of focus on evaluating the proactive value of AI. We need to consider what AI actually offers and what we want it to offer. It's not solely about determining whether it will cause harm; people are apprehensive about how this technology will be implemented. One perspective gaining traction involves ensuring the product's validation process is robust enough to prevent risks to various populations.” -Vladimir Manuel, Medical Director at UCLA Health From Vlad's comments above to perspectives others shared, we heard a sense of excitement for the promise of #AI and other new technologies. But we're also in a unique moment where the risks are not well understood. Still much to do here.

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Our partner Eddie Eltoukhy has identified these opportunities in Biotech. Eddie has a PhD in bioengineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and over a decade experience as an operator. Reach out to him if you are working on these areas of biotech. Pear VC - Technology-Driven Therapeutic Platforms Companies developing therapeutic assets with a core product engine Proprietary tool, workflow, or samples leading to novel biological data sets Preference for omics platforms or high throughput screening / engineering workflows First-in-class or best-in-class drugs - Next-Generation Therapeutic Modalities Technologies to improve the efficacy, safety, access, or reach of next-gen modalities including the following: Genomic medicines (gene tx & gene editing) Cell therapies Targeted protein degraders Antibody-drug conjugates Radiopharma - Precision Medicine New technologies supporting the discovery of novel biomarkers and the generation of proprietary data sets for applications in: Disease screening Therapy selection Recurrence monitoring - Life Sciences + AI Software Platforms Software & AI-driven platforms to improve all aspects of life sciences R&D, including: Target discovery and validation Drug design and optimization Manufacturing Regulatory Clinical development

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This week Mikal Ventures brings you a 4-week breakdown of the US capital market with an emphasis on the Mikal verticals. Over the 4-week period ending April 15, just over 900 new companies were added, with 94,109 companies included in the US Health Tech, Med Tech, Fin Tech, AI Tech, and Ed Tech verticals. AI Tech again saw the greatest percentage of growth in new companies and transactions, weighing in at over double the vertical averages for the period. The US Fin Tech vertical again led the way in SEC Filings and news articles. Mikal Ventures publishes these stats on a rolling 4-week basis to provide a perspective on how the verticals and new startups move through time. We hope you find them informative and thought-provoking. VC Investors are always adjusting their "Play Book" with a variety of options for investing. Mikal Ventures is one of those alternatives, offering curated solutions to real world problems. Reach out if you have questions on how we can be of assistance and bookmark https://mikalventures.com/ for additional insights and information.

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StartUp Health Launches 12 New Health Moonshot Communities: Call for Applications https://lnkd.in/e_NjchVb Apply to Join a Health Moonshot Community today. Health Moonshot Communities bring together vetted, mission-aligned founders and CEOs to solve the biggest health challenges of our time. Members of our Health Moonshot Communities are leading startups with breakthrough technology-driven solutions for the world’s biggest health challenges. Whether grant-backed, venture-backed, customer-backed, or bootstrapped, our members are looking for 100% mission-aligned wisdom, connections, and support. StartUp Health are currently accepting applications for the following Health Moonshot Communities. Access to Care Addiction & Opioid Crisis Alzheimer’s Disease Cardio Metabolic Health Children’s Health End Cancer Food Is Medicine Healthy Longevity Mental Health & Wellness Oral Health Rare Diseases Respiratory Health Type 1 Diabetes Women's Health https://lnkd.in/e_NjchVb

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The opioid crisis was a sad hallmark of my years working for the Baker Administration. In a time of extreme partisanship at the federal level, this was one area where public policy, civil discourse, and private enterprise seemed aligned and sufficiently motivated to find a solution. What we learned, however, is that dollars and access only go so far in combatting a disease that knows no so specific demographic. Instead, it's apparent that a battery of tools is needed to combat and prevent addiction--ranging from strong safety nets, to novel non-addictive pain therapies, and better technology. Introducing Marigold Health. Shrenik Jain, Ravi Shah, Tracey Cohen, MD, FASAM and team have built a proprietary NLP-based platform that--most significantly--improves the lives of those suffering from SUD/SMI. One customer we spoke with noted, "We needed a unique treatment intervention that had supportive research, fit into a CMS established model with a recognized service code, and that would provide positive clinical outcomes in an efficacious and fiscally responsible manner”. Another plainly said: "Marigold is our best hope to reach into the lives and help those who many have already given up on." Honored to join Bill Evans, Sean Day, and the entire syndicate in doing our part to scale a tool we believe will become essential in the fight against addiction. Marigold Health Innospark Ventures Rock Health KdT Ventures Matt Fates Lily Zarrella Venkat Srinivasan

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What happened in mental health last week? ⏺ The Biden administration announced a rule to strengthen mental health parity, ensuring equal coverage with physical health care ⏺ Wundrsight Health raises $400k from Inflection Point Ventures for their VR digital therapeutics ⏺ Lyra Health expand their Lyra Complex Care program by offering nationwide access to Lyra Renew for alcohol and substance use disorders and Lyra DBT (Dialectical Behvioural Therapy) ⏺ The Digital Therapeutics Alliance issues their comment letter in response to the CMS’ 2025 proposed physician fee schedule. If you are in the DTx space, you need to be on top of this. ⏺ Doctorpresso, a Korean company, launched REDI, a voice-based diary app designed to detect depression by analyzing voice characteristics ⏺ maze impact announced their funding of Miinta, a Whatsapp based psychological support for Gen Z ⏺ The Australian government has committed to imposing an age limit on social media (despite push back from many major mental health research organisations) ⏺ Mindset Health published the results of their RCT, showing very impressive results for their app-delivered gut-directed hypnotherapy (not quite mental health but super interesting) (Links in the comments) __ If you liked this and want insights on the mental health industry in your inbox every week, subscribe to The Hemingway Report newsletter and follow me Steve Duke 📩 #mentalhealth #behaviouralhealth

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"More than $12.5 billion has been bet on digital behavioral health in the last five years, according to Rock Health. Funding peaked in 2021, with $5.7 billion spent that year alone." As investors and innovators, I believe we need to broaden our focus in the behavioral health space from just expanding access to care, to effectively measuring the quality of that care. As we continue to encourage individuals, employers and plans to increase their spending and focus on behavioral health, we need reliable tools for measuring the long-term efficacy and impact of behavioral health services.

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I recently had the pleasure of speaking with and learning from several software execs from our portfolio companies and industry experts during Thoma Bravo's AI Summit in Miami. It was great to share our insights into trends and practices we see in our portfolio and how we manage opportunities and risks. At TB, we have a long history of guiding enterprise software companies through digital transformation, and we’re already navigating the transition driven by generative AI. Our focus is on managing this new innovation by absorbing the technology to bring meaningful benefits to our portfolio companies and indirectly to their customers. And it’s evolving fast! We see our portfolio companies today using gen AI in generally three ways: first, to create new products and provide customers with incremental use cases. Second, to defend against cyber attacks that have become much more sophisticated by bad actors. And third, as an enabler of talent to make business operations run more efficient and productive. In our view, AI presents a significant growth opportunity, but we also believe that to really maximize that potential, companies should carefully evaluate the risks and be thoughtful about governance, trust, security and data privacy. AI is poised to accelerate innovation and it’s hard to predict the full, transformative potential of AI, but we are confident that some of the advantages of incumbent knowledge and data will be key to unlocking its value.

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A prospective $3.1 billion U.S. IPO in a market with very few listed early childhood education firms. This rare public listing highlights the growing global trend of scaling early childhood education companies, as private equity and large operators seek consolidation for operational efficiencies. With increased focus on education investments, this IPO could pave the way for more large-scale moves in the sector. #Education #EarlyYears #Earlychildhoodeducation #Childcare #Nurseries #Preschools #Edtech #K12Education #PrivateEquity #VentureCapital #ImpactInvesting https://lnkd.in/dTu3DyPS

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Hospitals are facing a moment of transformation. While many innovations aim to move care beyond the hospital, these facilities remain central to the healthcare system—and a $2.5 trillion market. The challenge? Balancing growth and profitability, especially for smaller systems under pressure. At @BedfordBridge, we’re digging into how technology can drive meaningful change in hospital operations and care delivery. There’s no shortage of work to be done, but the opportunities are clear.

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I had the honor of moderating a panel of three hospital Presidents/CEOs at Laudio's inaugural Leadership Innovation Exchange (LINE) conference. We discussed “Future-Proofing Health Systems” and what is required for the next generation of hospital leadership to effectively manage the healthcare workforce. We didn’t have a crystal ball, but we had the next best thing -- insights from these three impressive leaders. Quick takes: 💡 Mark Slyter, DSc, FACHE of Dignity Health: High reliability organizations are the way of the future. When implemented correctly, retention is the output and not the goal. 💡 Bill Santulli, FACHE formerly of Advocate Health: When looking for his successors, he looked for leaders who are effective at change management…it’s ultimately all about culture. 💡 Joseph Mitchell of Franciscan Children’s: It took a strong arsenal of leaders who were resilient to complete the integration with Boston Children’s and ultimately to bring attrition down from 35% to 18%. Heard throughout the day were these fascinating tidbits from C-level leaders on what is improving their workforce culture and satisfaction: 🐕 Geisinger: ‘Paws to Reflect’ program that brought in dogs for healthcare workforce, not for patients 🤖 El Camino: Robots for patient wayfinding – an idea that stemmed from their nurses when they saw the robots delivering specimen 💻 Stanford: Being discerning about not automating processes that are terrible, but only the ones that are deserving Hats off to the Russ Richmond, CJ Floros, Emma Smith, Ashley N. and the whole Laudio team on this fantastic LINE-up!

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We're absolutely thrilled to announce a monumental milestone for Flo Health Inc.! After years of dedication to women's health, Flo, a long-standing member of the Target Global family, has secured over $200 million in Series C funding led by General Atlantic.This incredible investment propels Flo's valuation beyond $1 billion, officially making it a unicorn – a rare and remarkable feat in the femtech space. This accomplishment isn't just about numbers. It's a testament to the power of prioritizing women's health. Flo has seen phenomenal growth over eight years, becoming the #1 downloaded app in the Health & Fitness category. Today, Flo empowers nearly 70 million monthly active users (MAUs) and boasts close to 5 million paid subscribers. Notably, 1 in 4 US women trust Flo, solidifying its position as a leader in the global movement for women's health. But this is just the beginning! This investment fuels Flo's mission to revolutionize female healthcare experiences worldwide. By directing resources towards areas of critical yet unmet needs (which, let's be honest, encompasses a vast majority of women's health!), Flo will continue to be a driving force for positive change. Congratulations Dmitry Gurski,Yuri Gurski, and the entire Flo Health Inc. team! More in the Financial Times here ---->https://lnkd.in/dJZdajM4

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