Healthleap is a startup company that develops the AI platform, which identifies patients at risk of undiagnosed diseases by analyzing their medical records. TechCrunch has exclusively learned that this company has raised $38 million in seed and Series A financing rounds.
This round of financing includes a $8 million seed round, co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital; as well as a $30 million Series A financing round, led by Hummingbird Ventures. The company has not disclosed its valuation.
Healthleap was founded in South Africa in 2022 by siblings Jemima Meyer and Josiah Meyer. Initially, this startup provided a clinical nutrition tool Jemima developed for nutritionists. However, Josiah Meyer told TechCrunch that later on, the company shifted to creating a more general-purpose platform aimed at identifying patients hospitalized who might suffer from malnutrition or delirium, among other conditions, which often go undetected early on.
Josiah said, "There are two types of data in a patient's medical record. Test results, weight, and vital signs are found in structured fields, but the most informative information is often contained in the clinical doctor's written notes: poor appetite, recent weight loss, muscle loss, difficulty swallowing. The method we are developing is designed to extract affirmative or negative mentions of these clinical concepts in a way that is easy to expand and scale."
He stated that the company's platform is currently deployed in over 50 hospitals for the screening of conditions such as malnutrition and delirium. Healthleap has also established projects to identify the risk of re-admission due to aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers, and congestive heart failure, Josiah noting that these projects are undergoing further clinical validation.
In order to identify patients who may be at risk of disease or have not yet been diagnosed, Healthleap integrates with the hospital's electronic medical record system and uses language models to extract information from written records, such as recent weight loss or difficulty swallowing. Subsequently, this analysis is combined with structured information like lab reports and vital signs into a risk model, thereby identifying patients who may require further attention. The company notes that its software does not diagnose patients; it merely marks items that need further review.
Josiah explained, "Every night, we analyze the records of each adult inpatient: test results, vital signs, weight, medications, dietary instructions, diagnoses, clinical doctor notes, and so on. The next morning, we incorporate the risk scores into the existing workflow of the nursing team and provide an accessible dashboard that contains more information about the patient's trends."
Malnutrition can be a useful starting point for Healthleap, as this condition is often undiagnosed yet can have adverse effects on patients' recovery in various aspects. Studies show that 20% to 50% of hospitalized patients suffer from malnutrition, and some research has linked malnutrition to prolonged hospital stays, impaired wound healing, infections, and other complications, as well as higher incidence and mortality rates.
Josiah said that in the past year, the number of hospital partners for Healthleap has grown from 3 to over 50, with clients now including Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist, and Emory Healthcare. He mentioned that revenue has increased by more than ten times during the same period, but did not disclose the specific figures.
This startup company sells three-year contracts, with pricing based on the number of beds permitted by the hospital, and also adopts a results-based pricing model. Josiah says: “We have the hospital’s finance team verify and attribute the returns to our hard investments as a measurable ROI. Based on this, we ensure in the contract that the returns are several times the contract price. So far, each customer has seen at least 5 times the hard ROI, and in some cases, the annual total ROI exceeds 20 times.”
At the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, Healthleap indicated that their malnutrition program had a financial impact of $23.8 million per year, of which $6.3 million came from additional reimbursements, and $17.5 million came from shortened hospital stays.
Healthleap plans to use this new funding for engineering, products, sales, and customer success, as well as to increase support for the identification of more diseases. Meyer indicates that the company ultimately hopes to cover more than 40 major health conditions and expand into outpatient and home care services.
