Ordinary Folk, a Singapore-based telehealth startup dedicated to men and women’s health issues, has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding from Monk’s Hill Ventures. The funding will be used for hiring and expand into Hong Kong while scaling in Singapore.

Founded in 2020 by Sean Low, the startup has two main platforms: Noah is for men’s sexual health, mental wellness, hair care and weight management, while Zoey focuses on sexual wellness, fertility, mental health and wellbeing.

Low says he started Ordinary Folk to ease the pain points of an in-person clinical visit, while also making it easier to seek care for stigmatized conditions like erectile dysfunction.

“Men’s and women’s health conditions are intimate problems that affect all of us at some point of our lives, whether directly or through your partner,” he told TechCrunch. “And before we started Noah and Zoey, there weren’t any good solutions in Singapore and Hong Kong.”

The company chose Hong Kong as its next market to expand into because there are many similarities between Singapore and Hong Kong, Low added. For example, both are densely-populated and fast-paced, with healthcare systems that have the same issues, he said.

“While there are nuances, Singaporeans and Hong Kongers also identify similarly on issues such as high healthcare costs, fear of illegitimate medication, inconvenience of visiting a doctor and the stigma attached to men’s and women’s health conditions,” he explained.

Ordinary Folk says that since its launch, its revenue has grown by over 130% and it has had over a million unique visitors. It differentiates from other telemedicine startups by building a full healthcare stack, Low said, including healthcare and logistics for medication in non-description packaging.

This also means Ordinary Folk was able to create a health assessment patients take before scheduling an appointment, allowing doctors to make more detailed diagnoses.

“In the case of sexual health, having to answer intimate questions can be tough and what more to a stranger whom you’ve never met,” said Low. The health assessment was developed in partnerships with doctors and health experts. Ordinary Folk’s network of providers include physicians, psychologists, therapists and other specialists.

In a prepared statement, Peng T. Ong, the co-founder and managing partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures, said, “Millions of people across Asia find it difficult to access proper treatment and care for health conditions that have tremendous taboo attached. Through Noah and Zoey, Ordinary Folk is uniquely positioned to bring in value through the consumer journey of healthcare services, creating an ecosystem where patients have access to medical experts and products, and a wide range of treatment options.

Of the many labor issues that arose during the Covid-19 pandemic, one major focus was on healthcare workers, and specifically the challenge of staffing medical environments at a critical moment, during a public health crisis. Today, a healthcare staffing management platform called Lantum is announcing $15 million in funding, underscoring both how it came into its own over the last two years, and the business it has in its pipeline going forward.

Finch Capital led the round, with Piton Capital, Samos, and strategic backer Cedars-Sinai Hospital also participating.

Lantum is based out of London and works extensively with the UK’s National Health Service: 20 out of the NHS’s 40 integrated care systems, covering thousands of healthcare service providers, have already signed up to manage staffing through Lantum’s platform, with a bulk of that business inked since the pandemic. In the last 12 months, the startup said that booking volumes more than doubled, onboarding 14,000 additional clinicians.

Lantum’s sweet spot is to make it easier for healthcare organizations to break down silos and make it easier to move staff around as and when its needed most in operations that are adjacent to each other.

“The NHS recognized that the way to conquer its workforce crisis was by sharing each organization’s workforce with one another,” Lantum’s CEO and founder Melissa Morris said in an interview.

She said she first became aware of the issue when she was doing consultancy work for the NHS to try to address this issue. “I saw how chaotic workforce management was,” she recalled, finding that a whopping 70% of the entire system’s budget was going towards staffing and workforce costs. “Why would you not focus on that?”

Lantum’s platform enables care centers — be they vaccination or specialist clinics, hospital departments, GP surgeries (local family doctors’ offices), telehealth centers, or something else — list what help they need and when. It then allows qualified contract, permanent, and temporary, paid and unpaid NHS workers who are open to taking those shifts find them based on skillsets, location and time, and sign up for them, and then eventually get paid for their work.

In doing this, Lantum also effectively creates a comprehensive database of active and less active individuals, and what they are able to do in terms of their skills and availability, so that an organization can get a better picture of who is potentially available and where they might need to work on staffing and skilling up.

The approach seems simple enough, and frankly not unlike any other staffing platform on the surface. The difference here, Morris said, is that Lantum is purpose-built for the specificities of staffing in a healthcare system. More general purpose platforms are not able to onboard new people and verify qualifications, and then run a system that only enables those people to connect with jobs they are capable of doing, not those that they cannot. And those general-purpose tools do not cater to the needs of the healthcare centers — the employers — to a have an interface that makes it easy to create and list jobs that target those people.

Covid-19 put front-line healthcare workers center-stage in a critical way because they were collectively, by virtue of their jobs, perhaps the group most exposed to those with infections. So being able to at least better organize who worked when and where, and how to make that as efficient as possible, became especially important.

I should point out that I experienced Lantum’s usefulness first-hand. When the U.K.’s vaccination campaign first kicked off, I was one of the more than 540,000 people in the country who have to-date volunteered their time to help with the effort.

At first, the call-outs for volunteers with specific skills were chaotic and haphazard. I was an “admin” who was trained to look up, update, and find and flag problems in individuals’ health records when they came in for their shots; others were trained to give vaccines; others were “stewards” who helped usher people through the process.

All of us would have found out volunteering likely through word-of-mouth or by going to get our own vaccines. We’d email a person and get added to a mailing list. Then, usually the night before or maybe a day before, we would get an email with the call-out for help.

The people running the volunteers were usually very overworked nurses and other professionals who were themselves usually giving up free time to volunteer above their normal workdays. Often, it never felt like any single person’s dedicated job to just stay on top of it all.

Even with what were regular vaccine days each week, it was hard to know if you’d be called in, or for them to know who they might need to help, until the very last minute. I wondered many times why the nurses corralling volunteers in my local network of four clinics didn’t at least use a spreadsheet to try to get people to sign up in advance. Then suddenly Lantum appeared, and things got a lot easier.

The Cedars-Sinai investment and relationship — which are important not just because of the profile of that hospital, but because it’s Lantum’s first big foray in U.S. market and the U.S. health system — has been several years in the making, Morris said.

“We first started working with Cedars-Sinai in LA started before the pandemic, but then we had to put that on hold,” she said. Now it’s providing scheduling for the hospital’s ICU staff. “It’s eye opening how similar the problems are in the U.S. even though the system is so different from the U.K.’s,” she said. Many people were indeed using pen, paper and excel spreadsheets, she said, a poor substitute for a smart system that worked end to end, from the creation of the job, through to finding suitable candidates, having them sign up and finally paying them.

A part of the funding will be used to continue staffing up Lantum and developing tools for its UK customers, but another part will be going towards the U.S. expansion. Morris described Cedars-Sinai as a “beachhead” for the latter strategy. It may also involve raising more money in this round after Lantum got significant interest from other investors as it raised this $15 million.

“Lantum has had a momentous year. Their staff count has doubled in the last year alone, as they work to help those on the frontline of this pandemic,” said Aman Ghei, a partner at Finch Capital, in a statement. “Digital transformation must be at the forefront of the NHS [and] Lantum is well-positioned to continue to deliver solutions that do better by the NHS, for its staff and for its patients.”

Primary healthcare provider Cityblock Health has named co-founder Toyin Ajayi as its new CEO. The company, which has raised nearly $900 million and has a valuation just shy of $6 billion, focuses on delivering comprehensive, quality care to the underserved population relying on Medicare and Medicaid in the U.S.

Having previously served as the company’s president, Ajayi takes over from co-founder Iyah Romm, who took a temporary leave late in 2021 to focus on his own experience with “depression and the long-term effects of trauma.” Romm’s departure is now permanent, and Ajayi steps into the permanent chief executive role after having served in an interim office of the CEO led by current Cityblock Health board chair Andy Slavitt.

Ajayi, herself a former practicing physician, recently joined our podcast Found to talk about her experience working in the communities that Cityblock serves, and how it led to her founding the company.

French startup Doctolib has announced that is has raised a new funding round. With this round, the company has reached a valuation of €5.8 billion, or $6.4 billion at today’s exchange rate. That makes Doctolib the highest valued French startup.

The startup says it has raised $549 million (€500 million) in both equity and debt. Doctolib doesn’t name those investors. Eurazeo, General Atlantic, Bpifrance and Accel have invested in the company in the past.

In case you’re not familiar with Doctolib, the company’s main product is a software-as-a-service platform for doctors and medical workers. The company wants to help them tackle admin tasks. In particular, Doctolib acts as a booking platform that connects doctors with patients; 60 million people have used it in France, Germany and Italy.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to grow from 2,500 employees to 6,000 employees over the next five years. Doctolib relies on a vast network of offices in major and mid-sized European cities so that they can talk with doctors all around France, Germany and Italy. Doctolib plans to operate across 30 cities.

In January, Doctolib talked about its roadmap for 2022 and beyond. The company plans to create a suite of products and expand beyond appointment booking.

And the company has already added some new SaaS products, just like Salesforce is always iterating on its suite of products. In addition to a telehealth add-on, the startup has a product called Doctolib Médecin that can help you centralize documents, see a patient’s history, take notes and issue invoices.

With Doctolib Team, the company is creating an instant messaging service for health professionals. They could use the service to securely talk about patients and send documents.

As Doctolib operates in a highly sensitive industry, the company has also been investing in security and privacy. Doctolib acquired Tanker, as I first reported. Tanker is a turnkey solution that helps you enable end-to-end encryption in a medical application.

Overall, 300,000 healthcare workers are using Doctolib — not all of them pay for a monthly subscription. The startup also works with 250 public hospitals. And if you’re living in France, you know that Doctolib has become ubiquitous.

Vira Health, a U.K. startup that offers personalized digital therapeutics for women going through menopause, has closed a second round of funding — taking $12 million from lead investor Octopus Ventures, along with participation from U.S.-based VC firm Optum Ventures, as it gears up to hop over the pond.

Existing investors in the April 2020-founded business also joined in the latest round of financing. Vira’s £1.5 million seed — announced last summer — included backing from LocalGlobe, MMC Ventures, Amino Collective and other angels. (The startup is reluctant to label this “second raise” using standard fundraising terminology but, when pressed, pegs it as equivalent to a Series A.)

Vira’s app — Stella — which launched in the U.K. last August, delivers information and targeted support for women who are experiencing menopausal symptoms, supporting them to make lifestyle and behavior changes aimed at tackling whatever blend of physical and/or psychosocial issues they’re experiencing.

This means the app may be serving up exercise programs alongside diet advice or a course of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to combat insomnia or mood-related issues, or indeed another combination of customized support programs.

It also takes a community approach to further expand the support, with opportunities for users to be brought together for Q&As/Zoom chats around discussion topics so they can quiz experts and/or share related experiences with each other.

This sort of digital therapeutics formula looks very familiar now — given the decade-plus we’ve seen a variety of established therapeutics being digitized to scale and reach more people in need of targeted support via their mobile device, whether for problems with sleep, mindfulness and mental health, diet, addiction, sex, musculoskeletal conditions and even aging, to name a few.

Menopause has had relatively less love than some other areas where digital therapeutics startups have been busy for years. Although there is a growing number of players in this space too now — such as the likes of Elektra Health, Gennev, Peppy and Lisa Health.

Over what has generally been a boom decade for digital health, we’ve also seen the rise of femtech as a distinct category — and raised awareness has increased the volume of funding to female-led startups that are tackling issues which exclusively affect women. So it follows that the attention-value calculus is continuing to shift. Hence now a U.K. startup that’s addressing an issue which “only” affects a subset of woman (middle-aged females) can close a double digit second round just a couple of years after being founded.

Not that raising Vira’s latest tranche of funding was a cake-walk, says co-founder and CEO Andrea Berchowitz.

“We were speaking to one investor in the U.S. — who I’m sure would be not thrilled if I said who it was — and she said she’d seen 30 menopause startups and had not done an investment yet,” she recounts, saying one of the hurdles for that particularly reluctant (unnamed) investor was a question mark over whether women in the U.S. are actively seeking this sort of care, being as the conversation around menopause over the pond is not as advanced as it is in the U.K. (where Berchowitz emphasizes the topic gets a lot of mainstream media coverage).

“Fundraising is so hard,” she adds. “I think it’s really important to keep saying that — sometimes you can almost forget how hard it was when the money hits the bank account but it’s really hard.

“We know it’s hard for women to raise money… every data points shows that. Let’s not pretend it’s not. And then when you’re raising for a product that no one in the room has experience with — because they’re either young or male — the fact is we need someone to basically be over 45, probably over 50 — there’s not a tonne of that and then to be female so yes we have to do a lot more education.

“However I think it’s an interesting litmus test because… people who are unwilling to learn about new things probably aren’t right for us as investors. And so our approach was to really target funds that had either invested in women’s health before or digital therapies before. So we knew we could have a conversation with them about what we were building.”

Commenting on Vira’s funding in a statement, Kamran Adle, health investor at Octopus Ventures, said: “Menopause is an enormous yet underserved and underfunded market. One billion women, or approximately 12% of the global population, are expected to experience menopause by 2025, and we’re excited to work with the Vira Health team.”

“We are pleased to invest in Vira Health,” added Julia Hawkins, general partner at LocalGlobe and Latitude, in another supporting statement. “There is a strong interest in menopause care right now and this is a phenomenal team committed to building what women want and need.”

Image Credits: Vira Health

Berchowitz says the second raise will go on building out the app’s care pathway — including launching a telehealth component so that users will be able to book a virtual consultation with a physician and get prescribed pharmaceuticals (such as hormone treatment) if appropriate, rather than needing to step away and go see their regulator doctor.

It is also gearing up for a U.S. launch of the app — which it’s penciling in for the second half of this year, according to Berchowitz.

Menopause is a multifaceted challenge to tackle. It can trigger years of disruptive symptoms for women — ranging from mood changes, sleep disruption and brain fog, through changes to menstruation (i.e. before periods eventually stop), low libido and painful sex, hot flushes and night sweats, and other physical shifts such as weight gain and incontinence — which means Vira’s app is necessarily designed to tackle a spectrum of issues women may suffer as they go through this life change. 

To ensure the app is targeting relevant support, it personalizes the package of therapeutics based on what the user tells it they’re most concerned about.

“The way it works is a woman comes on the app and she tells us what symptoms are bothering her the most,” explains Berchowitz. “That was based on the fact that menopause is going to be an entirely different experience for everyone — no two women have the same symptoms and the same health background and the same preferences and the same way they want to be talked to and all that.

“So we say you tell us what’s bothering you the most — and if that’s sleep and incontinence then we’re going to help you with that. If it’s weight gain and feelings of low mood or anxiety then we’re going to help you with that. And then we take those symptoms and we design a 12-week program to help get relief for those symptoms.”

“Each program is based on the best available science for that given symptom,” she adds. “So if that’s sleep it’s built on cognitive behavioral therapy and sleep scheduling. If those are pelvic floor issues — so incontinence or painful sex — that’s built on pelvic floor activation.”

The science behind these app-based interventions draws on current best practice per symptom, according to Berchowitz, although she confirms the app itself is not currently a regulated medical device (rather it’s offered as an information service).

That said, as the product evolves — notably as Stella expands from dishing out purely information-based support into becoming a telehealth platform which may be involved in issuing prescriptions for pharmaceuticals or being able to provide a service like fitting a Mirena coil — the nature of the interventions are set to change. And Berchowitz further confirms its regulated status may therefore end up changing too, suggesting an application for regulatory clearance could be a future step for the business.

(And, again, that sort of trajectory isn’t new: We’ve seen other femtech startups evolve from building a pure consumer service to launching a regulated medical product. See, for example, period app Clue getting FDA clearance for a digital contraceptive.)

As noted above, Vira is by no means the first to digitize existing therapeutic approaches like CBT either, so — as regards the meat of a digital support service — it’s far from starting from scratch here.

Rather it can draw on plenty of existing success in the digital health category — gleaning inspiration and ideas from the growing body of implementations of digital therapeutics, pioneered by the likes of Sleepio, to name one of the early startups in the space (which recently raised a $75 million Series C from SoftBank’s Vision Fund).

This (now) rich field of digital therapeutic startups has provided passive support to Vira on the fundraising front, per Berchowitz.

“Our investors in this round are Octopus which has in its stable Quit Genius and Sleepio, among others, which are two digital therapies that did kind of go U.K. to U.S. — so I think there’s a lot to learn there,” she notes, adding of Optum: “They’re in Kaia Health, they’re in Equip which is a digital therapy for eating disorders.

“And that allowed us to have a really great conversation, like, you know how Kaia works, how it’s been sold, what their challenges and opportunities are — so using that frame let’s chat about menopause. And how it fits into that frame.”

“We weren’t convincing people that the digital delivery of lifestyle and behavior change was a totally new idea,” she continues. “We were saying maybe you don’t know but a lot of the things that you need to do to manage symptoms at menopause are lifestyle and behavior change — there’s specific exercises, there’s change to diet or it’s cognitive behavioral therapy — and these are all things that have been proven for digital delivery in other ways so what we’re doing is [what investors refer to as] a ‘horizontal roll-up’. So it’s unreasonable that a woman is going to have Sleepio and NHS Squeezy for pelvic floor plus an Elvie Trainer plus, plus, plus, and do that all!

“So the explosion of digital therapies allowed us to just say — yeah, that’s us. You’ve heard of that, you believe in that, this is how that applies to our area.”

“Optum is [also] very U.S.-health focused so I think we’ve tried to surround ourselves with as much of that experience as we can while continuing to build here in the U.K. because we do just get that feedback loop faster because menopause is on the [public/media] agenda,” she adds, fleshing out the strategy for the second raise — and noting that Octopus’ “stated interest in taboo topics” also made it “easier to go to them”.

What about product efficacy? Some of the new funding is being pegged for clinical trials of its approach. And Berchowitz also flags a feasibility study they undertook from December to February — which suggested 75% of women who completed their Stella treatment plans experienced improved symptoms. (Plus she notes they are polling users on an ongoing weekly basis to get a less formal “well being score”.)

Image Credits: Vira Health

So while she says the startup is not in a position to quantify exactly how much of the benefit users report from engaging with its app-based programs is — or could be — linked to a placebo effect, ultimately if women are finding the targeted support helps them to navigate a challenging period of life change does it really matter how or why it’s working for them?

“Sometimes what’s happening in menopause is your oestrogen is fluctuating all the time and so even if you are on hormone replacement therapy and doing your pelvic floor activation it could still be incredibly tough,” Berchowitz adds. “There is no silver bullet that just fixes it all for every woman and so I think placebo is one way of saying it — but I also think there is something about awareness and information that does remove some of the fear and the unknown.”

Placebo question aside, one thing at least looks relatively clear: An oft-reported lack of support for women raising menopausal concerns via traditional healthcare services is creating a sizeable opportunity for startups to step in, unbundle the use-case and offer specialized care to middle aged women for a fee. (Including, evidently, in the U.K. where healthcare is available free-at-the-point-of-use.)

“Not everyone gets high quality menopause care from their GP [doctor] — we hear that time and again,” says Berchowitz, expanding on the rational for bolting on a telehealth component. “We’re not trying to be a GP service, we are trying to be a specialized service for women seeking out care at menopause.”

Vira isn’t disclosing how many users its app has at this stage but Berchowitz is upfront that they expect the U.S. to be a relatively challenging market to grow the business — given how discussion around menopause is less developed there than in the U.K.

The U.S. also of course has a very different healthcare model. And she further notes that there can be a lot of variation states-by-state — adding that Vira will thus be spending time adapting and localizing content to ensure that the language and tone used strike an appropriately familiar note.

Vira’s business model for Stella is two-fold: Direct to consumer paid subscriptions and a B2B2C approach which targets employers to fund the service, making it available as a free benefit to their staff. And Berchowitz confirms it plans to use broadly the same approach in the U.S.

“The model will be similar in the U.S. because I think the workplace angle for us is the priority — we have lots of conversations with workplaces that are really making a shift in how they think about benefits. And the focus on women, especially senior women, is increasing — not enough but it is increasing. And so the conversation of ‘if you provide better support for women at menopause you can keep them longer, you can support them to make that next promotion, which also means you have more role models.’

“It’s much louder in this country than it is in the U.S. — but it has started in the U.S. So I think the workplace benefits is one we’re going to stick with.”

The workplace focus is also where it all started for Berchowitz.

Winding back to the beginning of Vira’s journey, she says the idea for the business began with a personal urge to do something to address the lack of women in senior leadership positions — having seen little progress on this very visible problem over a long career at McKinsey and also working for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“I’d been in senior positions and the lack of women at the top was something that was talked about a lot and just didn’t change in that whole time I was there and so I knew I wanted to do something that helped women jump over that last promotion or help them in the workplace,” she tells TechCrunch. “I wasn’t totally sure what the issue I was going to tackle was but I knew it was something about getting women into senior positions.”

The idea crystalized into tackling menopause as she explored the topic, hearing stories about women abandoning their careers or struggling to cope with professional demands as they experienced years of what can be deeply disruptive changes.

Meeting the right co-founder was also key to launching Stella, per Berchowitz. Her co-founder, Dr. Rebecca Love, is a chronic disease epidemiologist and an expert in behavior change — bringing the dedicated medical expertise needed to credibly underpin a recasting of lifestyle change-based therapeutics in digital form.

“I was really lucky to meet Rebecca,” recalls Berchowitz. “At that point she was looking at obesity and diabetes and we hit it off as friends — and the kind of entry point for her is that menopause is this amazing entry point into later life health for women where the things that need to happen to manage symptoms around exercise or nutrition or pelvic floor activation or strength training. That sort of lifestyle and behavior change affects immediate symptoms — so it gives relief in the short term —  but also really changes the long term health trajectory for a woman.

“So we kind of met over this idea that menopause could be a really interesting and untapped way to really change the lives of women over time — and so Vira Health was born.”

Despite the fact that we spend more on healthcare per capita, the U.S. leads the wealthy world in maternal mortality. And health inequity plays a big part.

Zaya Care, founded by Leoni Runge, operates here in the States but is modeled after the European maternal care system, and wants to change things. (European maternal outcomes are superior to those in the United States.)

Right now, one of the biggest issues that expectant and new mothers face is that care from their gynecologist ends as soon as they leave the hospital after giving birth. And to be fair, much of the care they need in the postpartum period should be delivered by other types of specialists, like pelvic floor therapists, postpartum mental healthcare providers, acupuncturists and others.

Unfortunately, however, most of these specialists aren’t covered by insurance providers. And the ones who are are in short supply, while others can cost quite a bit. The reason for this is that many of these specialists run their own small practice, and the administrative burden of working alongside insurance providers is high, for less reimbursement.

Zaya is working to group up these providers and negotiate on their behalf to the insurance providers, handling the administrative side of things and getting better reimbursements.

The startup’s CEO Runge grew up in Germany, where her sister is a OB/GYN. She saw how the medical system there wrapped around the entire experience of pregnancy, from conception to postpartum care, with service providers even coming to the patient in their own homes.

Tackling the problem here in the States was not a matter of building a great product, though the administrative functionality of Zaya’s platform is mission-critical. Rather, it was about solving for distribution, both on the provider and the patient side.

In a recent conversation with Kindred Ventures‘ Kanyi Maqubela, he explained that, for healthtech companies, distribution is the product.

Right now, Zaya is partnered with Emblem Health, Aetna, and United Healthcare, and is working to bring more insurance providers onto the platform. The platform currently has 50 providers visible and available to patients, with over 500 on the waiting list to get vetted and join Zaya.

I asked Runge if the company was looking at CityBlock as a leader when trying to rearrange the healthcare system while working within its existing boundaries. She explained that Toyin Ajayi, Cityblock cofounder and president, was actually an investor in the round and has been instrumental in workshopping the platform and product.

The startup recently raised a $7.6 million round led by Inspired Capital, with participation from Story Ventures, Tiger Global, Operator Partners, and founders and executives from Oscar Health, Dispatch Health and Headway.

Zaya isn’t the first company to recognize the issue with maternal care. Mombox is looking to offer moms a curated kit of postnatal products to help a mom through their first several weeks of recovery. Oula, Poppyseed Health, and Oova, and of course bigger companies like Modern Fertility are all playing in this space.

Considering the size of the problem, seems like it very well may take a village.

French startup Synapse Medicine has raised a new $28 million funding round (€25 million) led by Korelya Capital. The company has built a product that helps healthcare professionals get reliable drug information and prevent medication errors.

In addition to Korelya Capital, existing investors XAnge, MACSF and BNP Paribas Development also participated in the funding round.

There are many reasons why medication can turn against a patient — drug interaction, wrong dosage, side-effects, contraindications, etc. As the world’s population is aging and drugs are becoming more and more specific, it has become harder to know for sure that you’re prescribing the right medications as a doctor or pharmacist.

There are some existing software solutions that help you with prescriptions and medication reconciliation. “It’s a hyper fragmented market. Those solutions have been around for 30 years and people aren’t satisfied with what they’re using,” co-founder and CEO Clément Goehrs told me.

Synapse Medicine uses natural language processing to analyze and classify medication information from several sources — medication documentation from manufacturers, official recommendations from health authorities, and results from research papers.

After that, the company has built a software-as-a-service platform that can be used as a standalone product or as an extension to your existing Electronic Health Record (EHR) solution.

When you want to make a prescription, Synapse Medicine can draw information from its knowledge base and identify potential issues. Every time Synapse Medicine makes a recommendation, the product tells you the source of its conclusions.

It’s all about augmenting human decisions. And the product is constantly evolving with new recommendations added every week.

The startup mostly addresses hospitals. It doesn’t want to replace EHR altogether, such as Dedalus in Europe or Epic in the U.S. Instead, Synapse Medicine believes these products are going to evolve and become platforms that aggregate several healthcare products. Synapse Medicine wants to build the best prescription assistance brick for existing EHR products.

In addition to that go-to-market strategy, Synapse Medicine also integrates with telemedicine companies. “We have dozens of telemedicine companies as clients and more than a hundred hospitals,” Goehrs said.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to grow to 150 employees by the end of the year with offices in Paris, Bordeaux, Berlin, London, New York and Tokyo. As you can see, the startup wants to turn Synapse Medicine into a global company as quickly as possible instead of focusing on specific European markets.

Image Credits: Synapse Medicine

Raising a Series A is a different ball game from raising a seed round, and for Akilesh Bapu, CEO and co-founder of AI-powered medical transcription platform DeepScribe, giving prospective investors a hard deadline while leaning on early investors for support and guidance made all the difference.

“We were at this trajectory as a company where we had a semblance of product-market fit,” said Bapu, reflecting on the summer of 2021. “We had proven our product. We had about 200 live customers on the platform… We were excited about bringing DeepScribe to more customers and looking for the best partners to us there — not just in the short term but also in the long term. We had a long-term vision… and wanted a partner that bought into that vision.”

Eventually, the company closed a $30 million Series A round led by Index Venture partner Nina Achadjian, as the duo discussed on the latest episode of TechCrunch Live, our weekly program featuring entrepreneurs, developers and investors. The entire episode is available below, along with a portion of DeepScribe’s Series A pitch deck.

If not for the fact that Bapu and his team had set deadlines for the funding round, he said DeepScribe might have not partnered with Index — Achadjian was on vacation when she read their pitch and tried to push the meeting to the following week, but Bapu said the process was moving fast. They met the following day.

Afterwards, Achadjian was sold. “When I walked out of the meeting, I went immediately to one of my partners, and was like, ‘Finally, I found the company that is following the right approach,” she said.

She added that this was a critical win for DeepScribe, as it’s essential to leave potential investors fired up and armed with a few bullet points, including on the team and market.

Prepare for due diligence

Since Index was interested in DeepScribe, the firm started conducting due diligence.

Achadjian said founders can expedite the process by anticipating questions, especially on market size and competitive landscape. Companies can also provide investment firms with summaries of customer call notes.

“Then we come up with a list of key questions we want to go deep on,” Achadjian said. “What’s the business model? How do you scale? References. I actually called one of Akilesh’s Berkeley professors. We do a lot of customer calls and check references on the entrepreneurs. Then, honestly, we like to spend time with the team and see them in different environments.”

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S., but the healthcare industry spends more money helping patients after they get sick, instead of keeping them healthy.

To fill this gap, Heartbeat Health, founded by Dr. Jeff Wessler, has raised more than $30 million, developing a digital data layer that uses telemedicine, remote diagnostics and digital heart health programs to give patients and clinicians a more proactive way to stay healthy.

On our last episode of TechCrunch Live, we spoke with Wessler and Kindred Ventures’ Kanyi Maqubela to learn how its first fundraising deal came together and how Heartbeat’s pitch deck helped convince Kindred to invest.

Insight versus experience

“We look for founders who have a combination of domain insight and domain experience,” said Maqubela. “A lot of people who are very experienced in a domain are not totally insightful about it. They know all the reasons why you can never do something in that area. It takes a beginner’s mind, almost a little naivety, to have real insight in some areas.”

Though it’s often seen as an advantage to have experience in the industry you’re trying to solve for, or sell to, that experience must be paired with the insight to see a solution.

Maqubela said Wessler’s optimism about addressing cardiovascular health in a new way, paired with his deep understanding of the existing landscape, was attractive: “What I liked about Jeff was that he was from that world, but he was not of that world,” said Maqubela.

He added that Kindred is more than willing to invest in founders before they have a product or even a prototype, but that there is certain criteria involved. Alongside domain insight, Kindred also looks for personality that people want to partner with. As part of the firm’s investment due diligence in Wessler, Kindred helped recruit technical co-founding partners.

“The theory was that if one of them was ready to quit their ‘insert great job X’ to go work with this cardiologist, that’s actually a really important input that he is CEO material as well as a clinician,” said Maqubela.

TAM

As we dove into the pitch deck, Wessler and Maqubela both highlighted an early slide (pictured below).

We often hear that heart disease is the number-one killer, but the extra context around the problem of heart disease itself was critical in telling the Heartbeat Health story. The slide described cardiovascular disease as a bigger threat than all cancers combined, but is 80% preventable.

“It’s the biggest health issue facing America and has humongous impact,” said Maqubela. “Everyone I’ve spoken to since day one of Heartbeat Health, either in a pitch capacity or a recruitment capacity or from our team, has experience with heart disease, with friends or family or loved ones in one way or another. It’s a problem that gripped you.”

Jade Kearney was experiencing postpartum depression when her daughter was six months old. She was trying to complete her second masters at NYU, while dealing with a mental health crisis and a dearth of mental health pros who could help a Black woman navigate this situation.

So Kearney did what all entrepreneurs do: She developed an app to help solve this particular problem.

She had to teach herself about running a company and figure out funding mechanisms on the fly, all while facing obstacles and roadblocks directly related to being a Black woman founder trying to found a company aimed at other Black women.

Along the way, she did more than start a company. She went out of her way to design workshops and conferences to help other women of color in her position find their way together and to learn from her discoveries and her mistakes.

If that wasn’t enough, she also wrote a book based on the lean startup methodology called Lean While Black, aimed specifically at and adapted for Black founders, whom she said faced a different set of biases and challenges than their white counterparts. She felt she needed to revisit the technique defined by author Eric Ries in a way that made sense for Black founders.

I sat down with Kearney to discuss her experiences and how she has persevered in the face of enormous obstacles.

There should be an app for that

When Kearney began experiencing postpartum depression, she realized how few therapists had been trained to help Black women deal with mental health issues.

“​​While I was trying to finish my second master’s degree, I had to figure out how to navigate that space alone because between cultural stigma and medical neglect for Black women in the postpartum period, there was really no outlet for me,” Kearney told me.

It was at that point that she decided to start a company to help solve the problem.

“And that’s how I founded She Matters because I felt like I didn’t matter,” she said. While her professors at NYU were sympathetic in terms of giving her extensions to finish her work, she said nobody could really understand the weight of being a Black woman who was experiencing postpartum.

She Matters takes a multifaceted view of Black women’s health problems. First of all it has created a community of therapists, which have been trained in a 12 week certification program, so that they make their therapy culturally relevant to these women.

“Therapists pay a fee to be on the app and be connected to Black women who want therapy. But the thing that’s different with our app and others is that these therapists are culturally competent and understand the very tumultuous relationship that Black women have had in the healthcare system,” Kearney explained.

Women who need therapy come to the platform and sign up to be connected with one of the trained therapists. The company already has 180 trained therapists on the site and another 700 on the waiting list, and when they opened the app out of beta to the public in January, 7000 people signed up with 3400 in the first 24 hours alone, she reports.

The company and the app grew out of a project related to her Master’s Degree in Digital Media Design for Learning at NYU. She needed to build an app as part of a project, and she was trying to figure out what that should look like when she focused on the problem that was playing such a big role in her life at that moment.

“[So I decided] let me just do something that I’m already involved in. I was already involved postpartum, I’m already Black. So let’s create an app for Black moms who have postpartum anxiety and depression and create a community. And so that’s where I really started on my tech journey,” she said.

Building the product

Kearney and her co-founder Marguerite Pierce started building the app that Kearney had envisioned. That started in a classroom and continued as the pair applied to a two-week startup sprint program at Leslie Entrepreneurs Lab at NYU and got it in. There, they continued to refine their idea.

While the app began to take shape, and the two women received good feedback on their idea, the general impression at that point was that they didn’t have a complete startup idea quite yet. They then got into the NYU Launchpad. Excited to get to work, Kearney says she instead encountered racism and a failure to take what she was trying to do — build a business — seriously.

“When I [started saying] that I was a tech founder, I really started to encounter racism. It’s not that I haven’t experienced racism and sexism, but once I decided that this was my title, I started experiencing all these microaggressions,” she said. People wouldn’t acknowledge she was a tech founder in publications or they would ask her to talk about being a Black woman founder, instead of helping her achieve her goals to build a successful startup.

She says racism took shape in other ways, too. One of her mentors at NYU outright discouraged her from applying to incubators like Y Combinator and TechStars.

“I remember being at NYU and one of the mentors said, you know, TechStars and Y Combinator, those are great accelerators, but you won’t get in — and I was like, what?! I won’t get in! What do you mean?! — Oh, well, you won’t get in because you’re a Black woman, and your company is for Black women, and no one really cares about that…We’re in TechStars Seattle right now.”

Other challenges and obstacles

While all founders face challenges getting noticed and funded, the number of Black women founders who get funding is a tiny sliver of the overall pie. Consider that there was $137 billion in venture funding in the first half of 2021 alone. Of that, Black founders got just 1.2%, creating an even bigger challenge to get a piece of that minuscule amount of money.

Kearney certainly recognizes that and has been exasperated by it.

“It’s so challenging, but so is just to be at this level as a Black female. The whole thing is crazy and challenging. So if we’re in the room, we’ve clearly been able to jump over all of the hurdles to get there, and we’re usually one or two in the space. So then to say you’ve gotten here, you’re [unique], and we’re not going to give you money. It’s crazy, it really is. It’s a lot,” she said.

She said it’s been incredibly frustrating trying to raise money. “I’ve had investors say things like ‘I love hip hop’, ‘Are there that many Black women’, or ‘Did you really develop the technology yourselves’?”

She added the frustration is real, but she is determined to keep working.

“I’ve cried more behind closed doors in the last 12 weeks than I have in my entire life, but I refuse to give up because Black women are suffering and the problem is fixable. It’s about community and communication, and it’s about making as much noise as possible in the healthcare industry so they know we will not stop until change in maternal morbidity and patient outcomes drastically improve.”

So far, she has raised $300,000 in angel money and as she completes her time at TechStars she is in talks with multiple investors with the goal of raising $2 million in seed funding.

As she has navigated her own journey as a Black woman founder, she has attempted to help others by writing a book, conducting workshops and conferences and keeping the lines of communication open. Having experienced directly the challenge of being a Black woman founding a company, she says she not only wants to build a successful startup, she wants to be a role model to help others to achieve a similar goal.

Hearts Radiant, a Spanish startup that’s building a “longevity coach” for seniors — with the goal of extending quality of life through app-based personalized coaching designed to combat and even prevent frailty — has closed a seed round of funding as it gears up to launch in the US, eyeing Florida’s 4M+ over 65s.

We covered the startup as it came out of stealth to announce pre-seed funding for its digital coach, aka Rosita Longevity, back in October 2020. It followed that by launching out of beta in Spain at the end of 2020 — and went on to amass around 2,000 “very active” users, with an average DAU/MAU of 30%.

The app is offered as both paid or a lighter, freemium version.

“Over the first months we worked on creating adherence and medical plans and by September 2021 we came out of beta and launched our first paying cohort,” says co-founder Juan Cartagena. “The cohort was capped to 40 users paying an average $60/quarter because it involved many manual processes.

“Over the last five months we have been working on automatizing those processes while delivering the service to those users (aside the other ones on the free version). To this day we have had just one person churning and an average DAU/MAU of about 80%, which is incredible for a non-chat product.”

The idea for a personalized digital coach to motivate seniors to make lifestyle improvements to raise their quality of life and even, potentially the number of healthy years they can live — grew out of an in-person spa/retreat for seniors run by the wife-husband founder team.

Digitizing programs developed at the spa — and proving that digital coaching and other remotely delivered technologies can be as effective as in-person therapies is a key part of Hearts Radiants’ mission, as it works to scale a business that sells ‘longevity as a service’.

A clinical trial on its approach is still ongoing, with progress having been delayed somewhat by COVID-19. But the startup tells TechCrunch it plans to publish research on its methodology soon, possibly this summer.

The app-based coaching program packaged as Rosita Longevity focuses on encouraging (gentle) exercise as a way to boost seniors’ mobility and decrease frailty, as well as increasing their social connections (via cohort-based group classes) for an age group that can suffer especially from loneliness and associated mental health issues.

The app organizes seniors into different cohorts depending on their physical condition and muskulo-eskeletical symptoms in order to tailor support — with AI used to help develop a personalized plan per user, based on information they provide about their mobility and any illnesses/conditions etc.

But core to the program is “motivational” coaching — which is provided by (human) healthcare professionals who, while they are dispensing advice/classes digitally, are certainly not made of pixels.

The app-delivered program also provides seniors with other information on how to live better for longer, such as advice on diet, or provides support to manage chronic pain, such as through targeted physiotherapy, in addition to serving up info on relevant emerging research around ageing and longevity.

“When you download the app you go through an evaluation process where Rosita learns where you are today and relevant issues of your past health, helps you set the goals for your next months and proposes an action plan to achieve them. The plan combines live and recorded sessions, follow up tests and group chats with our specialists that will cover all the questions and issues our seniors have,” explains Cartagena.

“We have found these group sessions very relevant in the senior community because as you age, most of the pathologies affect them in a very similar way (comorbidities are very similar and close in symptoms) so it feels very productive to group them in terms of learnings and follow ups.”

“Users inside of a cohort get a personalized plan but are coached in teams per cohort, leveraging social health and peer dynamics. So we are connecting the human part with the automated part for most impact, keeping a healthy trainer ratio,” he adds.

The €2.4 million ($2.8M) seed round was led by Barcelona-based impact fund, Ship2B ventures. Other investors include JME Ventures, KFund, Seedcamp, Bankinter, Seedlink Health, Telefonica Wayra, the University of Chicago, and a number of business angels — including Cristobal Viedma (founder of Lingokids) and Poonam Sharma (a “health veteran” at Oscar Health).

As well as the seed funding the planned expansion into the US — where Cartagena says it will (at least initially) opt for the same b2c model, charging seniors to access a “Prime” version of the app that unlocks access to more classes/therapies — the startup wants to spend on R&D with the goal of developing what he describes as “longevity biomarkers with biomechanics and artificial vision”.

Which is a condensed way of saying the startup hopes to be able to use computer vision/machine learning technologies to automate the detection and assessment of frailty/prefrailty in seniors to better tailor programs and interventions, even if the only hardware in the room is a relatively old smartphone with a not-so-amazing camera.

Further plans for the seed funding are to expand “longevity plans” to more specific cohorts — “based on a combination of behavioral patterns and health history” — so it can offer increasingly customized programs.

“The holy grail of all of this is preventing frailty before it happens,” adds Cartagena. “Frailty and prefrailty are like being diabetic and prediabetic: It is just a matter of where you set the bar. Neither prefrailty nor prediabetes gets much attention but the impact to society is very large. We want to find the people who have the risk of becoming prefrail much much earlier, in their 60s and early 70s.

“We are initially very focussed on functionality, which includes biomechanics, muskulo-eskeletical changes and other areas related (such as gait strength or patterns) that are proxies to mental health (even stronger than cognitive tests!) and literally life expectancy. As we grow we will combine these tests with other lifestyle data, blood tests, microbiome and epigenetic clocks.”

“Tests for frailty and prefrailty exist, but geriatricians can easily point a frail person by looking at how they walk a couple of steps. Therefore an AI might be able to do the same,” he adds.

Asked about the ongoing clinical trials it intends to demonstrate the effectiveness of its digital programs, he suggests the “key variable” is consistency — noting that the current paying cohort is doing 320 minutes+ of exercise a week (“which even for in person coaching is amazing for the senior community”).

“What I believe we have proven with our pre-seed round, is that you can achieve high adherence and results with virtual coaching,” Cartagena adds. “The WHO recommends 150 minutes of physical activity for seniors per week (the average is less than 50 and most do 0 minutes (walking does not count)), and we are achieving a lot more than that (320 in paying users and 170 in non-paying users), plus people are feeling better so they are also becoming more active outside the App, which we do not measure properly yet. This amount of activity in seniors in really unheard of in geroscience.”

Berlin-based Mayd, a startup that’s building an on-demand medicine delivery platform in Europe, has fast followed a chunky seed raise last fall — with a €30 million (~$34M) Series A funding round led by US investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Previous investors Target Global, 468 Capital and Earlybird Venture Capital also chipped into the Series A.

The round brings Mayd’s total raised to date, since the business was founded at the beginning of 2021, to €43M.

This early funding velocity looks akin to the pace investor cash has been flying into European on-demand grocery delivery platforms since the pandemic supercharged app-based delivery.

Grocery delivery startups have gone on to pull in some very beefy B and C raises in recent years, such as the almost $1BN Series C for Berlin’s Gorillas in October. So it’ll be interesting to see whether investors feel moved to plough similarly heady sums into more specialist on-demand startups, as founders work to slice and dice opportunities around app-based ordering and speedy local delivery. (See also, for example, the $20M Series A raise earlier this month for another German ‘instant delivery’ startup which is focused on premium, branded goods.)

For now, though, Mayd is keeping schtum on its valuation.

Demand for medicines and/or non-prescription products sold in pharmacies — all of which Mayd’s platform is being designed to deliver at speed — is fairly universal, if not quite up there with the daily human need to eat. So investors are likely attracted by the prospect of solid demand — assuming execution is strong.

That said, grocery as a category isn’t purely food; there are overlapping products vs what you can find in a pharmacy — so there is some direct inventory competition here, even as prescription medicines (which will be coming to Mayd) are a specialist type of order that isn’t typically possible via an ‘instant grocery’ delivery.

Plus, the convenience of in-app ordering and to-the-door delivery for meds may offer more of a pull vs general food delivery — given pharmacy shoppers are disproportionately likely to be feeling unwell or caring for someone who’s sick so may be especially keen to avoid leaving home to make an essential purchase.

Mayd’s delivery pledge in the cities where it operates is to get the order to your door within 30 minutes — for orders made between the hours of 8am and midnight (next day delivery thereafter).

It’s scaled out quickly from its first city, Berlin, also launching into Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt am Main, Cologne and Düsseldorf. Across this footprint it currently offers access to 2,000+ prescription-free medicines and other pharmacy products, ahead of changes to the e-prescription system due this month which will enable it to also take orders for prescription drugs in Germany.

This pace of expansion means the startup has already grown to 100+ employees, as well as 350+ delivery riders — who it says are “permanently employed” (this means “directly contracted” with Mayd, i.e. not employed via subcontractors).

The Series A funds will be used to further step on the growth gas — with Mayd eyeing expanding into two more European markets over the new few months and scores more cities.

“We will use the new funds to invest in the company’s expansion in Germany and Europe, hiring key positions with a focus on technology, as well as in the further ramp up operations,” it tells TechCrunch. “Until the end of Q2 we plan to launch in two other markets in Europe and currently are looking at our best options.”

The startup says typical customers for its pharmacy order delivery service so far skew more female than male, and tend to fall into the 35-45 age range — having a focus on “convenience first”. (Aka: “Our customer base is urban, digital and appreciates our 24/7 service a lot.”)

Mayd also says its shoppers are ringing up bigger basket sizes than for online groceries.

But, well, medicines and ailment potions tend to be relatively expensive vs general groceries so that’s not too surprising. It is important to making the unit economics stack up for the speedy delivery though.

“Highly in demand are ailments against the common cold, OTC products for acute health problems like dry eyes. Beyond that everything for the needs of Mother & Child is popular amongst our customers,” it adds. 

Mayd says it takes a commission on sales of non-prescription pharmacy products but does not charge for delivery.

For e-prescription orders it has said the model will either entail a delivery fee or listing fee.

Asked about the looming launch of e-prescriptions in Germany, Mayd claims it will be “the first company on the market to integrate the instant delivery service into our system”, adding: “This way we will be able to fully cover all needs in the area of health. Customers will have the chance to order their prescription medicines in an instant, in a convenient and time-saving way.”

Looking ahead, the startup says it expects to pass 100,000 customers over the course of this year as it expands out from (currently) six cities — soon to be seven, as it dials up service in Stuttgart next week — to more than 50 cities across its operational footprint in the first half of 2022.