Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease. It’s the most common cause of dementia, impacting around 55 million people globally. It’s a leading of death for the elderly, but mortality isn’t the worst thing about Alzheimer’s disease. Before they die, this disease robs people of their minds, taking away the interests and knowledge that made them who they are. In a tragic way, it steals people’s identities. That’s the challenge, and it’s a big one. Thankfully, there are incredible entrepreneurs and research...
Nov 22, 2023•21 min
At StartUp Health we’re all about what’s new and what’s next in health, and that often means talking about cutting-edge technology. But sometimes the most radical way to improve is also the simplest. One example? Our food. This week, as we head into Thanksgiving in the United States, we’re talking about the role food plays in managing not just our weight and fitness, but actual chronic diseases. Some people use the term 'Food as Medicine,' and the more research we do, the more ways we find that ...
Nov 16, 2023
According to some estimates, out of the HHS, nearly 50% of kids have experienced some kind of mental health challenge. And not just anxiety about an upcoming test or depression over a breakup, but persistent feelings that interfere with daily activities. Health innovation companies have been on the case for years, including many from the StartUp Health community. They're tackling the science – like what's the best way to treat mental health challenges in teens – and they're also tackling engagem...
Nov 02, 2023
Our episode this week was recorded during our StartUp Health Studio interviews at the recent HLTH conference in Las Vegas. At the event, a hot topic was how artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, is going to fundamentally shift healthcare delivery. AI can help us comb through mountains of information and take action on data points that were previously hidden from view. But many people have a serious concern – even a fear – that AI will degrade the doctor-patient relationship and ef...
Oct 26, 2023
This week’s StartUp Health NOW podcast episode is a conversation with Health Transformers Alexandra Dantzig and Erin Frankel, the co-founders of Jetsweat. As you'll hear, their company started out as a fittech marketplace for boutique fitness brands, helping these small independent fitness companies create high-quality digital content and reach new audiences. Recently, however, Jetsweat – which joined StartUp Health in 2022 – has made moves into the realm of value-based, whole person care. They'...
Oct 19, 2023
There's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in business: “You can't manage what you can't measure.” It's a quote attributed to Peter Drucker, the famed management consultant. If business leaders such as Peter Drucker are right, not being able to measure the effect of an action would make it impossible to know if we should be doing more or less of that action – or if we should be doing it at all. But if the saying is true in management, it's even more true in clinical medicine in most areas o...
Oct 05, 2023•27 min
Our StartUp Health NOW guest this week is Amir Bozorgzadeh, CEO & Co-founder of Virtuleap, a brain health company that joined StartUp Health in 2019. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, and expanding to Barcelona, Spain, Virtuleap improves brain health with VR. In this chat, Amir will walk us through their new platform – Cogniclear VR – that combines neuroscience with virtual reality games and activities to detect cognitive disorders. He’ll explain how VR can play an important role in the diagnos...
Sep 28, 2023•24 min
Our StartUp Health NOW guest this week is Ole Kjerkegaard Nielsen, PhD, CEO & Co-founder of GO-Pen, a company in our Type 1 Diabetes Moonshot community. As you'll hear, Nielsen and his team based in Denmark have built a new kind of insulin pen, one that is affordable and accessible to all while also adhering to the absolute highest standards of quality. This more accessible insulin pen could change millions of people's lives. We'll also get a glimpse into the uniquely challenging startup journey...
Sep 22, 2023•23 min
We’re back with a new season of the StartUp Health NOW podcast! This week we’re chatting with Richard Hirsch from UnaliWear. UnaliWear, under the guidance of CEO & Founder Jean Anne Booth, is a long-time StartUp Health community member that is changing the game in medical alerts for seniors. UnaliWear built the voice-first Kanega watch that provides discreet support for falls, medication reminders, and a guard against wandering – and allows seniors to call for help if they need it. It gives seni...
Sep 14, 2023•29 min
For this StartUp Health NOW episode, we dive back into an interview we did with a long-time Health Transformer, Naheed Kurji. At the time of the interview, Naheed was the CEO, President & Co-founder of Cyclica, a StartUp Health company that is considered one of the pioneers of what is now the increasingly hot space of using AI for drug discovery and development. We wanted to revisit this conversation because in the time since we aired it, Cyclica had huge news. In May 2023, the company was acqui...
Aug 30, 2023•35 min
As we gear up for the launch of the next season of this podcast, which will drop after Labor Day, we're bringing you replays of favorite episodes from the past. This week, we're featuring a conversation with Jon Miller, a member of the StartUp Health Board of Directors. Miller is best known for being a former CEO of AOL, Head of Digital Media at News Corp, and Chief Executive of the media powerhouse IAC. With all of that experience in media, Miller might seem like an interesting choice for a boa...
Aug 24, 2023•19 min
Typically on this show we talk to the health tech founders – who we call Health Transformers – that are creating the tools and platforms that will modernize our health system. Or we talk to top investors on what they're looking for in startups. But, on this week’s StartUp Health NOW, we look back at one of our most-popular podcast episodes, which featured a different kind of guest: one that helps round out the picture of how healthcare innovation goes from idea to real-world implementation. Robe...
Aug 09, 2023•22 min
For this StartUp Health NOW episode, we are taking a look back at a great episode featuring Aaron Kowalski, PhD, the CEO of JDRF International. Anyone orbiting in the universe of Type 1 diabetes knows that JDRF is the world’s largest nonprofit funder of T1D research. In his role atop the organization, Kowalski has combined his professional experience as a molecular biologist and executive with his personal passion to fight Type 1 diabetes in order to impact patients like his own brother. Kowalsk...
Aug 04, 2023•20 min
On this week’s StartUp Health NOW, we look back at one of our most-popular podcast episodes: a chat with Julie Yoo, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz – where she leads investments in healthcare technology, with a focus on companies that are modernizing how we access, pay for, and experience the healthcare system. During this chat in front of a live audience of founders from the StartUp Health community, Yoo talked about the growth of home health, fintech for healthcare, and her personal p...
Jul 27, 2023•57 min
On our episode today we are getting down into the details, deep the weeds, in order to understand what it takes to scale a healthcare business to $100M. For that wisdom we turned to Sofia Guerra, an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. We recently had her on our Health Transformer University Masterclass series to share top takeaways from a recent benchmarks report published by her firm. She distilled their very detailed work into five key takeaways and then hung around to answer questions from...
Jul 21, 2023•42 min
Our podcast guest this week is Avanlee Christine, CEO and Co-founder of Avanlee Care, a company that joined StartUp Health in 2022. A few years ago Avanlee found herself helping to coordinate care for her grandmother. Everyone in the family wanted to help, but she lived far away, and there just wasn’t a good way to check in on her health and be the kind of support that Avanlee and her family wanted to be. As many entrepreneurs do, Avanlee said to herself: There must be a better way. So She raise...
Jul 14, 2023•27 min
Whether they like it or not - and they probably don’t – every health tech founder needs to think about money. How much they need, and how to get it. For many founders, raising outside funds becomes a whole new full time job that they have to take on. This year, funding in the sector has dipped sharply, making that job even harder and more stressful. On our podcast this week, we hear from the other side of the table. We sat down with the heads of two major health tech investment firms and got the...
Jul 06, 2023•21 min
Our guest this week is Matt Blumberg, CEO and Co-founder at Bolster. He’s the author of the books “Startup CEO,” “Startup CXO,” and most recently “Startup Boards.” That last one was why we wanted to have him in for a special masterclass with the founders from the StartUp Health community. As you’ll hear, Blumberg has developed a detailed strategy for maximizing your startup’s board. It’s a time-tested framework for making sure your board is an asset to your business not a tax. Drawing on his own...
Jun 30, 2023•36 min
When we first met today’s StartUp Heatlh NOW podcast guest, he was a newly-minted doctorpreneur. After finishing med school Yusuf Sherwani, MD, teamed up with a couple fellow doctors to tackle a massive, pervasive problem they were facing in their clinics: Day after day they were seeing patients struggling with addiction, whether smoking or drinking or opioids. These were people stigmatized by their addictions into fear and inaction or they’d reached out for help and found the options unsuccessf...
Jun 15, 2023•28 min
So you’re healthcare founder who has designed and built, by the sweat of your brow, a new platform or product that can help people live longer, healthier lives. Now, you just need to get it into people’s hands so they can use it, give feedback, help you iterate, and ultimately scale. As every founder knows, building the product is just a first step. Getting to market is a whole other challenge. There are lots of different approaches for go-to-market strategy – with StartUp Health’s community of ...
Jun 09, 2023•21 min
For years we’ve tracked investment trends at StartUp Health and talked quarter after quarter about how women’s health has been underfunded. Finally, that is changing, and more founders and more funders are actively bridging that divide, creating new, necessary solutions for women, whether in fitness, pre- and post-natal care, chronic conditions, fertility, or menopause. Our podcast guests this week are two Health Transformers who have been dedicated to FemTech before the new surge in interest in...
Jun 02, 2023•23 min
Some startups provide tools directly consumers and patients while others tackle issues in the hospital, at the other end of the care journey. Our two guests today, Dr. Scott Kaiser from Determined Health and Nick Lockett from Pear Suite, occupy a sort of middle ground. They empower communities and community-based organizations to provide better care for vulnerable people. It doesn’t take much to see the need for more empowered communities in healthcare. Every day we see more headlines about an e...
May 25, 2023•22 min
Welcome to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health. So when you go to the hospital for care, you accept that the outcome isn't completely under your or your doctor's control. Even with textbook healthcare, bad things can happen for a variety of reasons and your health can decline. Put another way, it's hard enough when good care results in a bad outcome. But what about when a preventable error occurs? It can seem incomprehen...
May 19, 2023•22 min
One of the words that gets thrown around so much at StartUp Health that you might get tired of hearing it is 'collaboration.' We say it a lot. However, you’ll only get sick of the word if you think it’s just startup jargon or lip service. But at StartUp Health that’s just not the case. StartUp Health was designed from day one to promote a collaborative ecosystem in health innovation. For more than a decade we’ve been bringing like-minded founders together to learn from each other and support eac...
May 12, 2023•25 min
Our StartUp Health NOW guest this week is Caroline Cadwell, the CEO and Co-founder of Unpluq – a Dutch company that joined StartUp Health in 2021. Unpluq is on a mission to empower people to change their digital habits and improve their wellbeing. Cadwell and her team have designed a consumer-facing device and platform that helps people regain control and intentionality with their time. They’re pushing back against a world where attention span is eroding, which has contributed to lower feelings ...
May 03, 2023•24 min
Today in the United States, we do an entirely poor job of taking care of our pregnant mothers. If you look at statistics like maternal morbidity and mortality, it's been going up. And, through the pandemic, it's only gone downhill. We're one of the worst – actually the worst – of any advanced country. Welcome back to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health. Today we've got two very special guests on the show talking about on...
Apr 27, 2023•24 min
Our guest this week is Andrew Garza, co-founder of Lifestores Healthcare, a company that joined StartUp Health in 2019. When Andrew and his co-founder Bryan Mezue were launching their business in Lagos, Nigeria, their focus was on creating a chain of tech-enabled pharmacies – and by doing so, they’d create an accessible avenue for primary care in one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Fast forward a few years and they’ve done a couple key things, which we’ll cover in the interview. They...
Apr 20, 2023•25 min
On this episode of StartUp Health NOW, we’re talking with Jo Bhakdi, CEO & Founder of Quantgene, a company that joined StartUp Health in 2019. Bhakdi and his team have made a name for themselves by offering a kind of deep genomic profiling that allows them to identify cancers early, detect hereditary diseases, and find adverse drug interactions. The name of the game here is genomic medicine and we're not talking about 23andMe or Ancestry.com. As you'll hear in the interview, Bhakdi has a revolut...
Apr 14, 2023•29 min
Victor Wang, CEO & Founder of StartUp Health company care.coach, is at the tip of the spear of the AI-in-health revolution. He’s got an insider’s understanding of how technology like ChatGPT will shape healthcare. An MIT-trained roboticist who worked for NASA, Victor has created a conversational avatar that cares for seniors and people with disabilities. Currently there’s a human in the loop, but as you’ll hear in the interview, Victor has no trouble imagining a future where conversational AI is...
Apr 06, 2023•22 min
On this week's StartUp Health NOW podcast episode, we sat down with Charlie Bullock, the CEO and Co-founder of Scan.com, which is, to oversimplify, an online marketplace for diagnostic imaging services. We wanted to dial Charlie up for two reasons. The first is that this StartUp Health company has officially grown from their UK roots to developing a significant beachhead in the United States. We wanted to get a play by play about that process and distill some useful cross-border growth strategie...
Mar 24, 2023•29 min
