As a long time YC community member (10+ years) and former Visiting Group Partner, I'm always excited by the great companies that release each Demo Day. For me, it's like the Superbowl 🏈.
Read our coverage on YC S23 Open Source Meetup and Medplum's YC Launch
YC Alumni Demo Day was this Saturday September 2, and I thought the presentations were particularly good. Here's some exciting nuggets we saw in the presentations in the Healthcare and Life Sciences category.
- Mantle Bio - Snowflake for Biotech - enormous data sets, complex algorithms, and a workforce filled with PhDs who have a lot of domain expertise but little exposure to data engineering make this a fertile area. Great to see an MIT team here as well.
- Flex - Stripe for HSA/FSA - accepting payments period in healthcare and HSA/FSA in particular requires so many special agreements and there is a ton of float out there. I could see specialized medical services being built around these balances. A team with strong infra chops and big tech background is great to see here too.
- Decoda - AI medical claims creation. Just Google CPT 99205 (outpatient evaluation and management of new patient) documentation and you'll see why it would be great to have AI do this.
- Shasta Health - AI Platform for physical therapists. Patients need PT before and after surgery and treatment in so many cases for health reasons and for payers. Having an AI guided workflow here seems so useful.
- Ohmic Biosiciences - Genetically engineering plants for alternative to roundup. Clear win to getting this to work! A team out of UCB, and reading their launch brought to mind the movie Interstellar.
- Olio Labs - Therapeutics for tough diseases. There's a lot of great properties of targeting tough diseases. Details are long, but a Startup and FDA article may be of interest.
- Flair health - Shopify for holistic primary care. It's just a matter of time before there is a huge direct-to-consumer health company the likes of the biggest companies in America, that's the opportunity.
- Feanix Biotech - genetic testing for animal (cow) breeding. Clear win getting this to work as well! Launch highlights a team at the intersection of big tech and agriculture.
- Health Harbor - Gen AI to "call insurance" for clinics. The phone, like fax, is a major channel for information exchange. I could see one angle where they payers also put a bot on the other side of the line.
- Obento Health - Patient engagement for private practice. Patient engagement at the right level is a perennial challenge at all levels. If it's cracked it is a big deal.
- Andromeda Surgical - autonomous surgical robots. Love the ambition and it would be a breakthrough as trained surgeons are so scarce. Clearly a team savvy about Startups and the FDA.
- Medisearch - trustworthy medical search. Healthcare is all about trust! Trust is the difference between gold and garbage in this industry. A trusted search engine has immense obvious value. A very technical team working on this.
- Sohar Health - AI driven clearinghouse for behavioral health. Access to behavioral health is a huge issue at the societal level. Godspeed.
- Sensible Biotech - mRNA synthesis for therapeutics and vaccines. We all know how powerful mRNA is. Exciting. Related: FDA Orientation for Startups.
- Wattson Health - Software for managing Rx and automate manual workflow. Healthcare + automation, love it. The quality monitoring benefit seems like a big deal as well. Demo gif tells a good story to those (like us at Medplum) in the industry.
- Healthtech 1 - Automating repetitive healthcare processes. After fighting our way through interop and "standard" interfaces, we at Medplum know how powerful and compelling RPA can be for practitioners. This is a case in point in solving a burning pain point for practitioners.
- Synaptic - AI powered training for doctors Well organized, high quality medical knowledge is a sleeper category. UpToDate is the Craigslist of this category and am excited about the future. Also cool to see an interdisciplinary MD + big tech team at work on this.
- Simbie - AI powered practice in a box for NPs in women's health. I could see myself as a customer of one of their customers.
- Cleancard - cancer screening as easy as pregnancy test. Clearly valuable and loved their launch. We at Medplum serve several at-home test providers as customers and at home diagnostics resonate a ton with patients. Related: How to start a Biotech on a budget,
- Nanograb - AI-generated binders for targeted drug delivery. Nothing close to an expert in this space, but am enthusiastic about the descriptive name of this company, and like that they have a neat domain. 70% of drug trials fail because the "grab" doesn't work (poor targeting).
- MICSI - Higher resolution MRI with faster scan times. MRI (and ultrasound) are really valuable tools, and see many wonderful applications of this technology. MICSI stands for microstructure imaging, and I could see this technology being able to read the mind.
- Certainly Health - Book doctors and avoid surprise bills. How much (and when) are two frequent unknowns in healthcare. Great to see a technocratic approach here from a technical team.
- Stellar Sleep - clinic for chronic insomnia. Great use case for a specialized provider, as insomnia really affects quality of life and the standard advice from GP is to reduce coffee intake, neglecting frequent related issues like anxiety, hormonal issues and more.
- Empirical Health - proactive primary care, scaled with AI. I love the name and the premise. Also, so exciting to see a team with a deep understanding of precision,recall and value based care in this space.
- Eden Care - Digital health insurance for employers in Africa. Not an expert, but we see a good amount of Medplum community activity in Africa, and am bullish about the opportunity in region.
A huge congrats to YC S23 on your Demo Day!