When we think of healthcare, we think doctors, broken bones and outrageous bills. The healthtech industry is helping us think about healthcare in a more holistic sense, where hundreds of industry players work in unison to make the industry better and more efficient.
The next generation of healthcare is able to fill critical knowledge gaps, reduce exorbitant insurance costs, automate time-consuming tasks and efficiently address a wider variety of ailments, including mental health and diseases like cancer.
Bay Area Healthcare Startups to Know
- Quartzy
- Alto Pharmacy
- Rally Health
- PicnicHealth
- Invitae
- Lemonaid
- GoodRX
- Omada Health
- Hinge Health
- Komodo Health
- Nuna
- Calm
Founded: 2016
What they do: GRAIL focuses its research and technology on enabling early cancer detection. Its Galleri Test is a blood test that’s designed to pinpoint a signal shared by several different kinds of cancer, including bone, breast and stomach cancers. It’s available to patients by prescription and is recommended to be used in combination with other routine screening methods so that cancer can be caught and treated earlier.
Founded: 2012
What they do: Evidation makes health tracking software that people can use to quantify and maintain their health-supporting practices. The platform, which compensates users through a system of rewards, gathers health data and provides it to research organizations that use it in developing public health interventions. Users track actions like walking, meditating and dietary choices, and can integrate data from devices like Fitbit and apps like Strava.
Founded: 2009
What they do: Quartzy helps laboratories and companies within the life sciences industry ensure that they have the supplies they need available and on-hand in the moments when they are needed, helping teams hit milestones faster. The company operates as a leading life sciences equipment distributor with access to more than 10 million products from 1,800 leading brands while also providing a convenient platform for requesting, approving, ordering and managing inventory like consumables, reagents, chemicals and more.
Founded: 2014
What they do: PicnicHealth puts medical records into the hands of the people who actually need them the most — patients. The company provides a safe and secure platform for housing sensitive medical information provided by caregivers and tracked down by the PicnicHealth platform. Data is then organized and made easily accessible so users can have full transparency over their medical history at any given time.
Founded: 2010
What they do: Invitae allows people to have a better knowledge of their genetic health by offering tests that provide insights into family planning, ongoing unexplained symptoms and predisposed conditions that can have lasting effects in life. Built with advanced technology and trusted by top doctors and experts, Invitae brings affordability to testing and counseling services, facilitating proper genetic health for patients from all backgrounds.
Founded: 2011
What they do: Grand Rounds makes it easier for companies and individuals to make healthcare decisions. Each user is connected with a customer care coordinator, who, with the help of machine learning, pinpoints doctors in an individual’s network that are best equipped to handle each specific medical need. In addition to finding the optimal care, Grand Rounds’s platform also monitors healthcare bills, tracks medical history and equips patients with a list of pertinent questions to ask doctors.
Founded: 2013
What they do: Collective Health is a health insurance management platform for self-funded employers, enabling them to streamline the process of understanding and accessing health insurance plans for their employees. In addition to plan administration, Collective Health also offers services such as patient advocacy, analytics to help simplify benefits information, and employee engagement capabilities. Their platform helps employers maintain better control over their insurance costs and gain actionable insights into their employee healthcare data.
Founded: 2010
What they do: Big Health's digital mental health programs give patients access to digital therapeutic solutions with cognitive and behavioral techniques that deliver care in the moments when it is most needed. The company’s solutions are backed by peer-reviewed evidence and are attainable through a wide network of employers and health plans, putting people at the center of their own care with reduced costs and an experience that feels more like entertainment than medicine.
Founded: 2011
What they do: Doximity powers a digital network that connects physicians, clinicians, and other medical professionals with one another to help streamline communication and drive healthcare innovation. Their mobile app is utilized by over one million healthcare professionals across the country, enabling practitioners to deliver telemedicine to patients, make voice calls, deliver referrals and access faxes from their phones.
Founded: 2012
What they do: Benchling is a cloud-based software platform helping to speed up the life science’s R&D process. The software offers products like virtual research and inventory logs, workflow management tools and data analytics, so antibody, cell therapy, genetic or vaccine researchers can cut down on time digging through data and focus on actual research.
Founded: 2015
What they do: Clarify Health Solutions’s platform uses predictive analytics to optimize patient care, accelerate clinical trials and manage risk. For healthcare providers, the platform’s data optimizes in-network referrals and even personalizes care by predicting patient risk. Clarify Health also optimizes clinical trials by identifying highest-need members and creating action plans that reduce clinical variation.
Founded: 2009
What they do: Endpoint Clinical is a response software that allows clinical trial researchers to gain holistic insights into patients, clinical supplies and clinical operations. The company’s “pulse” platform supports the management of every aspect of the study design, and it allows researchers to handle randomization schemes, scheduling and other complexities that come with trials. “Drive,” another feature of Endpoint Clinical, is a clinical trial supply chain management tool that helps to proactively manage supplies and monitor budgets.
Founded: 2010
What they do: Nuna partners with healthcare and governmental industry parties to reduce data fragmentation and build incentivization of value-based care. Nuna’s platform bridges the data gap between payers and providers to reduce complexity in payment settlements and provide a more transparent reporting strategy to manage risk. Instead of accepting exploding healthcare costs, Nuna is automating and optimizing healthcare practices to reduce costs and provide better patient care.
Founded: 2009
What they do: Strava is a social network for athletes, where users can record their activity, share workouts and even compete against one another in online competitions. The app turns smartphones into running and cycling computers that track workouts and analyze data to help all athletes get a better workout. Runners and cyclists can even use the Strava app to see friends' routes or use a heat map to find popular routes near them.
Founded: 2012
What they do: Calm is a mobile app that focuses on boosting sleep, relaxation and mental health. The premium version of the app features freshly-created guided meditations, sleep stories that calm and soothe users to sleep, classes taught by world-class mental health experts and even curated music lists that promote focus, relaxation or sleep.
Founded: 2008
What they do: Syapse partners with health and life systems companies to deliver precision medicine insights on cancer. The company’s network delivers clinical, programmatic and research-based data to healthcare professionals all over the world. The data is used to see which treatments produced the best results with molecularly similar patients and implement similar trials.
Founded: 2017
What they do: Hims is a health and wellness e-commerce company for men. The site is full of hair, skin and vitamin products that help men focus on sustainable self-care for everything from acne to dry skin and hair loss.
Founded: 2014
What they do: Honor partners with local caregiving agencies to provide high-quality in-home care experience. The company helps families find reliable, consistent caregivers. Additionally, Honor helps home care agencies grow their networks and even recommends jobs and training sessions to in-home healthcare professionals.
Founded: 2013
What they do: Lemonaid Health is a telemedicine platform that allows users to access healthcare from the comfort of their homes. To access the full benefits of Lemonaid, all users have to do is fill out a questionnaire about their health, then a doctor will review it, follow-up with the patient and then any medicine to deal with treatment will be delivered to the patient in 2-3 days. Lemonaid’s network of healthcare professionals are able to help patients with anything from anxiety and birth control to high blood pressure, sinus infections and even COVID-19.
Founded: 2011
What they do: GoodRX connects patients with the lowest prescription costs. The platform helps people to search for the medicine they need, compare costs among different pharmacies in their area and then print free coupons for the drug they need. GoodRX is accepted at more than 70,000 pharmacies across the US (including Walgreens and CVS), and can save patients up to 80% on their prescriptions. GoodRX also connects patients with telehealth professionals that can help them with anything from general checkups to online therapy and even help for diabetes.
Founded: 2010
What they do: Rally Health is a personalized and incentivized healthcare software that allows users to access health benefit information, set personal health goals and track wellness activity. Collaborating with insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare and BlueCross BlueShield, Rally Health gives users the tools to find doctors to fit their needs and take control of their health, rewarding them when they achieve certain goals.
Founded: 2014
What they do: The Molekule air purifier, designed as a way to help reduce asthma and allergy symptoms in the home, eliminates pollutants at the molecular level. Instead of trapping pollutants and not eliminating them (which causes mold and viral issues), the Molekule purifier uses nanotechnology to destroy mold, allergens, bacterial and viral pollutants altogether.
Founded: 1999
What they do: With experience working alongside healthcare organizations ranging from pharmaceutical companies to care providers, W2O Group helps brands earn trust by ensuring their communications are on point. The agency staffs experts devoted to healthcare communication expertises like marketing, advertising, PR, science, intelligence and branding, strengthening the bonds between healthcare organizations and those receiving care.
Founded: 2015
What they do: Hinge Health is a digital healthcare program for those with musculoskeletal conditions, like joint or back pain. Instead of electing for ineffective surgeries or costly physical therapy, Hinge Health users utilize exercise therapy to stretch and strengthen their bodies. Users, equipped with data-gathering wearables and personal coaches, go through 15-minute personalized workouts, three times a week, that have been proven to reduce pain by up to 60 percent after three months.
Founded: 2014
What they do: Virta is a clinically proven treatment to reverse Type 2 diabetes and a few other metabolic diseases. Instead of relying on surgery or medications, Virta uses nutritional biochemistry and data science to tackle diabetes treatment. To date, 60 percent of Virta users reversed their Type 2 diabetes after one year, and patients with cardiovascular risks reduced their inflammation by 39 percent over the same time period.
Founded: 2015
What they do: An important part of healthcare is fitness, and Tonal makes it easy to stay in shape with their wall-mounted screen and attachable tools that act as a personal gym. The Tonal screen displays instructor-led workouts, stats and fitness trackers, while user handles resistance bands and other equipment to break a sweat. Watch it in action here.
Founded: 2015
What they do: Alto Pharmacy is a healthtech startup that serves as a digital-based pharmacy service for doctors, health centers and hospitals. In addition to stocking medications for general health and specialized health needs, Alto Pharmacy provides assistance with health insurance benefits coordination, price investigation tools and live chatting tools for both professionals and patients.
Founded: 2011
What they do: Omada Health is a behavioral medicine platform supporting people at risk of, or living with, chronic illness. The company provides coaches, who are trained to guide on patients with certain illnesses, connected health devices, weekly interactive lessons, personalized action lists and even online peer groups to help those living with chronic illnesses. In addition to individual use, employers and health insurance companies also use Omada Health to help users manage their conditions and live healthier lives.
Founded: 2014
What they do: Komodo Health’s healthcare intelligence platform helps providers, payers, researchers and partners provide better and more efficient service to patients. The AI-powered platform is able to map and predict disease in real-time. It also provides clinical researchers with comprehensive patient insights, so trials can run efficiently and correctly.
Founded: 2019
What they do: Headway connects people with mental health providers who are available for virtual or in-person appointments. Users can access the Headway platform online or through the company’s mobile app to answer questions about their care preferences and insurance coverage so they can get matched with therapists and psychiatrists who meet their needs.
