Healthleap, a startup building an AI platform that reads patient records to identify patients at risk for undiagnosed diseases, has raised $38 million in seed and Series A funding, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
The funding 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 has not disclosed the valuation.
Founded in 2022 in South Africa by brothers Jemima and Josiah Meyer (pictured above), the startup initially offered clinical nutrition tools that Jemima had built for dietitians. However, the company has since pivoted and built a more general-purpose platform. The platform aims to identify hospitalized patients who may be suffering from conditions like malnutrition and delirium that aren’t detected too early, CEO and co-founder Josiah Mayer told TechCrunch.
“In the patient’s chart 2 “Laboratory values, weight, and vital signs are in structured fields, but the most prominent signs are in the clinician’s notes: loss of appetite, recent weight loss, muscle loss, and dysphagia. Our developing approach is to extract positive or negative references to these clinical concepts in an easily extensible and scalable way.”
He said the company’s platform is currently deployed in more than 50 hospitals, where patients are screened for symptoms such as malnutrition and delirium. The company is also building programs to identify risk of readmission for aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers, and congestive heart failure, and Josiah said further clinical validation is underway.
To find patients who may be at risk for disease or who have not been diagnosed, Healthleap connects to a hospital’s electronic medical records system and uses language models to pull information from written notes, such as mentions of recent weight loss or difficulty swallowing. That analysis, along with structured information such as lab reports and vitals, is fed into a risk model to identify patients who may require further testing. The company says its software does not diagnose patients, but only highlights items for further review.
“Every night, we analyze all adult inpatient records: test results, vital signs, weight, medications, dietary instructions, diagnoses, clinician notes, etc.,” Josiah explained. “Every morning, we write the risk score into the care team’s existing workflow with an accessible dashboard that holds additional information about patient trends.”
Malnutrition is a condition that often goes undiagnosed and can negatively impact a patient’s recovery in a number of ways, making it a useful starting point for Healthleap. Studies suggest that 20% to 50% of hospitalized patients are malnourished, and some studies have linked malnutrition to longer hospital stays, impaired wound healing, infections, and other complications, as well as increased morbidity and mortality.
Josiah said Healthleap has grown from three hospital partners to more than 50 in the past year and now includes Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist and Emory Healthcare among its customers. Sales have increased more than 10 times over the same period, he said, without providing further details.
The startup sells three-year contracts priced according to the number of licensed beds in a hospital, and also uses an outcome-based pricing model. “We use hard ROI, which is verified by the hospital’s finance team and attributed to us as a measurable ROI. Based on this, we contractually guarantee that we will deliver a multiple of the contract price. To date, we have seen all of our customers achieve more than 5x hard ROI, and in some cases more than 20x annual total ROI,” said Josiah.
At the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, HealthLeap says its malnutrition program has an annual economic impact of $23.8 million, of which $6.3 million comes from additional reimbursements and $17.5 million from reduced length of stay.
Healthleap plans to spend the new funding on engineering, product, sales and customer success, adding support to identify more conditions. Josiah said the company eventually hopes to cover more than 40 major health conditions and expand into outpatient and home health care.
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