Last week, K Health, an AI-based primary care consultant announced it has raised its series B of $25 million – only five months after raising its series A. K Health was founded in 2016, and claims to be the first startup to use true AI in consumer health at the primary care level. Their secret weapon: Access to medical records. K Health’s AI was developed from data from Maccabi- Israel’s second largest HMO.
Access to data is the new engine for growth for healthcare innovation, and Israel’s medical records data is propelling the small country to be the next global hub for healthcare innovation.
That is the thinking behind a new partnership between an Israeli hospital and a health-tech venture capital fund to leverage the hospital’s vast medical data store as a sandbox for participating companies.
The new $45M fund, called Triventures ARC, will be the venture capital arm of the ARC Innovation Center, a health-tech hub inside Sheba Medical Center, a major Israeli hospital just north of Tel Aviv. The fund will be managed by Triventures, a global multi-stage venture capital firm focused on data driven transformational health technologies from genomics, cyber security for healthcare, e-commerce health services, wellness, robotics, decision support, medical devices to diagnostics.
Israel, whose digital health sector is booming, has been making access to patient data a key priority. This access allows companies to train algorithms for innovations like predictive care, decision support, remote monitoring, and drug discovery. The government earlier this year announced it would invest nearly 1 billion shekels ($287 million) in a project to make data about the state of health of its population available to researchers and private companies. In late November, Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and IBM Israel announced they were establishing an accelerator for digital medicine startups.
According to data from Start-Up Nation Central, there are around 1,400 life sciences innovation companies currently active in Israel today, spanning digital health (500, more than one-third), medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. Around 812 of them, some 57%, are early stage startups with under 10 employees. Around 440 (30% of the total 1,400) are growing companies, with between 11-50 employees.
The Triventures ARC $45M fund is targeting early stage digital health startups in areas such as personalized healthcare, accessibility and the “virtual hospital”, big data and artificial intelligence, smart medical devices, clinical and financial workflow management and cyber security for healthcare.
Source: Israeli VC, Hospital Launch $45M Medical Innovation Fund
