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Tag: Fundraise

  • Heidi Health raises $65M Series B led by Steve Cohen’s Point72 | TechCrunch

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    Dr. Tom Kelly is a trauma surgeon, and everywhere, he sees doctors drowning in administrative work. He wanted change, so he set out to build it. 

    “We wanted to build an AI care partner that would stand alongside clinicians and take care of the admin so that individual providers, like me, can feel empowered to deliver the care which we dedicated our lives to,” he told TechCrunch. 

    Dr. Kelly teamed up with Waleed Mussa, with whom he had worked at a previous startup, and founded Heidi Health in 2021. The company began launching products in early 2024. 

    In just 18 months, he said, the company has returned more than “18 million hours to frontline healthcare providers from more than 70 million patient visits in 116 countries.” 

    The product, as promised, is an AI medical scribe that takes care of all the admin work that hassles doctors. It can transcribe and dictate notes, generate personalized patient summaries, and even track tasks so doctors no longer have a need for sticky notes. 

    Heidi both built its own AI model and builds on top of other models, such as Gemini. “This model agnostic approach means that we can optimize our accuracy, latency, and cost,” he said. 

    On Monday, the company announced a $65 million Series B led by Steve Cohen’s Point72. It also announced a new tool: an AI agent that calls patients on behalf of the doctor. The former Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft, Dr. Simon Kos, is also coming on board, along with Plaid’s head of revenue, Paul Williamson. 

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    The company has raised $96.6 million to date. Others in the round include Goodwater Capital, Headline, Blackbird VC, LG Technology Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. 

    “They had seen all the scribes before,” Dr. Kelly said of Point72. “They’d never seen product adoption and usage metrics like they’d seen in Heidi. They also loved that we were obsessed about the end user experience, because they saw most of our competitors were just doing top-down sales.” 

    The fresh capital will be used to help with product development. 

    Dr. Kelly hopes that giving doctors more access to AI tools will expand the capabilities of clinicians and remove the “drudgery” of their work. 

    He said most of the conversations in the medical world right now are shaped by what is happening in developed countries, “but imagine a world where any healthcare provider in the world can use Heidi to increase their clinical capacity, where they can practice in a war zone, or a refugee camp, or a region hit by climate change or simply an underserved community,” he continued. “Heidi can help them reach more patients and deliver better health care results.”  

    AI is transforming the health tech. Others in the medical scribe space, in particular, include DeepScribe, Ambiance Healthcare, and Abridge. 

    Heidi said it works with more than 2 million clinicians a week, ranging from hospitals to individual practices. It has a free version of the product with paid features, which Dr. Kelly believes has been a good lure for new customers. 

    He said AI is understandably going to change everything in healthcare. But at its core, humanity is still very essential, especially when it comes to maintaining and building trust. 

    “It’s about doubling the world’s health care capacity. That’s the true promise of AI,” he said. “We want to bring it about.” 

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    Dominic-Madori Davis

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  • Norwest Venture Partners raises $3B for 17th vehicle, maintaining fund size despite market downturn | TechCrunch

    Norwest Venture Partners raises $3B for 17th vehicle, maintaining fund size despite market downturn | TechCrunch

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    Norwest Venture Partners, a 65-year-old firm backed solely by Wells Fargo, has raised its 17th fund at $3 billion.

    That’s a noteworthy number, given that NVP last raised the same amount in December 2021. That was the peak of the venture boom, and at that time, the firm said it increased its capital pool by 50% (NVP’s 2019 fund closed at $2 billion) because it needed to stay competitive in the dealmaking environment where round sizes and valuations have climbed to unprecedented levels.

    But things have obviously changed since then. Investors are backing fewer companies, and valuations have dropped and may fall further.

    Jeff Crowe, a senior managing partner, admitted that the investment rate in venture and certain sectors is slower than it was several years ago, but he said that dealmaking in certain strategies, sectors and geographies, such as growth equity, healthcare and India, is as robust as it was before the downturn.

    “We’ve kept a very steady pace and have delivered a number of nice exits,” Crowe told TechCrunch. “We felt it makes sense to keep going at the same pace.”

    Since closing its previous fund, the firm has helped 36 companies realize liquidity. Not all exits were great outcomes for the firm (NVP’s portfolio company VanMoof filed for bankruptcy protection), but returns from certain exits greatly outweighed the losses, according to Crowe. He pointed to the firm’s sale of Spiff to Salesforce, the buyout of Avetta by EQT for a reported $3 billion and the IPO of Indian-based Five Star Business Finance.

    Crowe declined to comment on returns, but said: “This is fund 17. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and in the venture world, you get to stay in business if you deliver really good returns.”

    NVP attributes much of its success to operating out of one large global multi-strategy fund. The firm invests in North America, India and Israel. It has an early-stage and growth equity business, and has recently added a biotech team to round out its existing healthcare practice.

    The diversified approach allows the firm to adjust its strategy when the market changes. For instance, NVP planned to invest in crypto companies when it raised its last fund, but the sector fell out of favor shortly after that, and the firm didn’t pursue many deals in the space.   

    “Our diversified strategy works well through ups and downs of investment cycles,” Crowe said.  “It gives us flexibility. That’s the beauty of it. We react faster to changes.”

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    Marina Temkin

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