Funding and Growth
Healthleap, a startup building an AI platform that reads patient records to identify patients at risk of undiagnosed illnesses, has raised $38 million in seed and Series A funding.
The financing includes an $8 million seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, and a $30 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures. The company is not disclosing its valuation.
Founded in South Africa in 2022 by siblings Jemima and Josiah Meyer, the startup initially offered a clinical nutrition tool Jemima had built for dietitians. But the company later pivoted and built a more general-purpose platform that aims to identify patients admitted to hospitals who may be suffering from conditions like malnutrition or delirium that aren’t often identified early enough, CEO and co-founder Josiah Meyer said.
AI Clinical Analysis
A patient’s chart holds structured data like labs, weights, and vital signs, but critical signs also sit in clinicians’ written notes regarding poor appetite, recent weight loss, muscle loss, or trouble swallowing. The platform extracts affirmative or negated mentions of these clinical concepts in a scalable way.
The company’s platform is currently deployed in more than 50 hospitals, where it screens patients for conditions such as malnutrition and delirium. The startup has also built programs to identify aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers, and risk of readmission for congestive heart failure, which are undergoing further clinical validation.
To find patients at risk of an illness or who were undiagnosed, Healthleap plugs into a hospital’s electronic health record system and uses language models to pull information from written notes. That analysis is then fed into its risk models alongside structured information such as lab reports and vitals to surface patients who may need a closer look. The software does not diagnose patients, but only highlights items for additional review.
Each night, the system analyzes every adult inpatient’s record, including lab results, vital signs, weights, medications, diet orders, diagnoses, and clinicians’ notes. Each morning, a risk score is written into the care team’s existing workflow alongside a dashboard holding additional information about patient trends.
Malnutrition serves as a useful starting point because it often goes undiagnosed and can adversely impact patient recovery. Research suggests 20% to 50% of hospital inpatients are malnourished, and studies have linked malnutrition with longer stays, impaired wound healing, infections, and higher mortality.
Hospital Adoption and Financial Impact
Healthleap has grown from three hospital partners to more than 50 over the past year, with customers now including Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist, and Emory Healthcare. Revenue has grown more than 10x over the same period.
The startup sells three-year contracts priced according to a hospital’s licensed bed count and also uses an outcome-based pricing model tied to hard ROI validated by hospital finance teams. Customers have seen a 5x hard ROI or more, with some exceeding 20x annual total ROI.
At the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Healthleap reported that its malnutrition program resulted in $23.8 million in annualized financial impact, of which $6.3 million came from additional reimbursement and $17.5 million from shorter hospital stays.
Future Expansion
Healthleap plans to spend the fresh capital on engineering, product, sales, and customer success as it adds support for identifying more conditions. The company ultimately aims to cover more than 40 major health conditions and expand into outpatient and home care.
