What Issues Are Health Startups Focusing On?

Worldwide health start-ups focusing on access to care and cost reduction measures are scoring the most money from funders, according to StartUp Health.

By the third quarter of 2019, global investors put $4.5 billion into organizations that address access to care issues, while companies looking at cost-reducing measures won $3.6 billion in seed and series funding. While these two areas received the most funding to date, the median deal size for each sector was smaller than start-ups focusing on curing diseases and ending cancer. The median deal for start-ups looking to improve access to care was roughly $6.8 million, while the median deal for start-ups focused on curing diseases was about $12 million.

The difference in median deal size could be related to what types of projects those investment dollars are supporting. Investors funding organizations concerned with access to care and cost reduction in healthcare are focused on patient empowerment and the workflow of clinicians and administrators. Companies taking on projects to cure diseases and end cancer are largely putting their investment dollars into research, a costly area of medicine.

Certain startups did not score the same funding dollars. Startups concerned with brain and women’s health have so far won somewhere between $240 million and $300 million, substanially less than some of the billion-plus dollar fields.