Milad Alucozai

What do bio and health applications mean for the next wave of AI -- specifically about compute? (I'm talking to you NVDA longs!) LifeX Ventures is hosting a super roundtable with some serious techbio leaders tomorrow along with Analog Century Management's Val Zlatev -- come hear Thomas Clozel Sean McClain Chetan Patel at 11am ET For the survey results based on asking 100 techbio CTOs and CEOs, join the call. Here, my own speculations after wrapping up the report: -- Amazon needs to have a GPU program on warp drive right now -- Nvidia needs to have a data center / cloud business in the works -- Edge AI chips are about to be everywhere -- in your watch, car, sneakers, thermostats, gene sequencers, spectroscopes -- All this compute needs way more data: expect a boom in sensors of all types -- Remember human genome moonshot that sequenced one person once? Now you can sequence your every cell one by one. Expect that for protein folding (AlphaFold was that moonshot) and other simulation uses, a full "twin" model of you, cell by cell -- Google has no angle here -- worse chips, worse cloud, worse models, worse phones / edge devices -- Specialty silicon for unique use-cases, lower-power, lower-memory are surely coming fast - like back in the day for mobile phones when Qualcomm, Broadcomm, Infineon, Mediatek, etc duked it out.

26

4 Comments

Hot off the pre-print server – an important publication authored by the Atropos Health team exploring the performance of LLMs in answering real-world clinical questions. LLMs excel at summarizing and contextualizing existing literature, but cannot generate de novo medical evidence today. The results of the study highlight performance gains attributable to injecting novel, relevant, and up-to-date medical evidence into LLM-powered clinical decision support systems. Brigham Hyde Nigam Shah Saurabh Gombar Read the study here: https://lnkd.in/ecuU25Pq

49

2 Comments

I am very excited to share the pre-print study on Atropos Health ChatRWD beta results(link to paper below). ChatRWD beta outperformed ChatGPT 3.5, Google Gemini 1.5 Pro. and Anthropic Claude 3 on answers to clinical questions when reviewed by independent physicians. OpenEvidence also outperformed the Big Tech LLMs by a wide margin. Most important to us, ChatRWD performed highest on Physician trust and Best Answer and was able to answer questions asked 94% of the time. As the Gen AI cycle continues to move at a rapid pace we firmly believe that "Trust" and "Accuracy" are going to be critical, and that publishing your performance on both is table stakes. It is also clear to me that in the quest to be able to answer 100% of questions with Clinical grade accuracy training LLMs solely on the literature will not be enough. We need to produce new evidence in the form of high-quality transparent studies using appropriate methodology. We are adding beta users post this announcement, so please sign up to try it, and we will have more to come on full launch this summer. Exciting times and hope everyone has a great July 4th. https://lnkd.in/es5gWK84 #generativeAI #LLM #Realworldevidence

215

11 Comments

At Innosphere Ventures, we’ve assessed 50+ Life Sciences startups, and we’ve noticed a trend among founders: to successfully solicit funding from investors, they need to create balance in their go-to-market strategies to be investor ready. This isn’t a surprising finding, given the majority of our founders’ status as first-time founders and academic entrepreneurs. We have amazing university partners, so the companies that they refer to us are excellent at their product and the science, they often have the foundation of a really great team, and they are on their way to a strong intellectual property strategy. But they tend to underbake the less academic parts of their investor-ready story. That’s where our Incubator comes in: to help founders balance their commercial model and story so that they’re ready to approach potential investors with an airtight business plan. With the right development, regulatory, clinical, and financial plans in hand, they’ll be able to convincingly pitch to investors how they plan to get revenue and traction, how they plan to get investors’ money back, and how they’ll generate growth… all music to investors’ ears. Our Incubator takes talented, knowledgeable founders, identifies any investor-readiness needs in their skill sets, and fills them in with critical go-to-market knowledge. That way, when they approach investors, they’ll have the full suite of product, science, and GTM know-how to successfully win funding.

28

6 Comments

Someone broke down the estimated costs of a $15 Sweetgreen salad. We need these cost graphics for digital health to help future founders. Especially for tech enabled cos, the greatest cost is labor. Much of the "value created" is in curation and matching, which means the gross margins are reliant on labor arbitrage. Pay someone $X, but get paid $X+Y% per visit. The challenge with healthcare is that you often have to pick one of two business models: 1. specialized, low volume, high cost, low gross margin % 2. generalized, high volume, low cost, high gross margin % I'd argue founders should focus on gross dollars over the lifetime of the customer (like Jeff Bezos said) instead of gross margin %'s, but we'll leave that for another time. The challenge is that many tech enabled digital health cos have high cost of goods sold (labor) and moderately high product, design, and engineering budgets. We must build differentiated solutions for patients, clinicians, and clients to be out incumbents, however, we're realizing that companies are ultimately valued on the discounted value of future cash flows. And the high SG&A costs at most organizations might be inbalanced to the unit economics of the business. I'm not sure the math pencils out for everyone unfortunately. But I'm just a guy on the internet, would love to hear the thoughts from those smarter than I (you!). Comment below. --- p.s. I have no idea the accuracy of the graphic and not an investor in Sweetgreen. Cheers. Credit: David Crowther

113

27 Comments

Exciting news from Monica Chopra, Jeffrey De Flavio, MD, Samantha Adelberg, and the rest of the Auxa Health team as they officially announce their $5.2M Seed round. The team's deep industry expertise and drive for change have led them to solve critical infrastructural friction to providing quality healthcare and adoption of value-based care. Auxa's AI benefit navigation platform is simplifying the complexities of healthcare by streamlining all of the fragmented and siloed data and information to make it actionable in real-time for healthcare organizations. For the 70% of Americans who aren't getting access to the health and social care benefits they deserve, Auxa's solution will be pivotal in enabling equitable care. We're thrilled to partner with co-investors Zeal Capital Partners, AlleyCorp, Laconia, and Chaac Ventures on this journey and look to share many more milestones ahead. Cc K50 Ventures, Ryan Bloomer, Daniel Vásquez, Nick Talwar, Stefanie Ng https://lnkd.in/dPDY7-Db

44

4 Comments

I recently sat down with Michael Batko, CEO at Startmate and Founder of Puddle Pod for Episode 11 of Insane Ambition. Startmate has invested in 230+ startups, much of it under Michael's leadership, and now has $3.5b in value across its portfolio companies. In this episode, we discussed: - Michael's journey from consulting, then living in the Amazon rainforest, to leading Australia's biggest startup accelerator - The future of Australia's startup ecosystem - The labour government's very stupid plan to make it harder for people to qualify as sophisticated investors (now thankfully shelved) - Startmate City! Startmate's plan to build Australia's first startup city. Probably the most ambitious idea I've ever heard from a startup accelerator. - The balance between visionary thinking and traditional startup advice (think Elon Musk's plan to colonise Mars, vs Y Combinator's problem/customer obsession) - "The Courage to Be Disliked", and its influence on Michael's approach to life and business. Links in the description below 👇

61

4 Comments

On the latest Vital Signs, Nikhil Krishnan and I had a ton of fun chatting with Dr. Atul Butte. Dr. Butte is a professor at UCSF, Chief Data Scientist of the UC Health System, and a co-founder of numerous healthcare startups. In our conversation, Dr. Butte shared his takes on healthcare AI opportunities, challenges, hype, and more. A few highlights: ⚡LLM use cases, data, and growth LLMs are already helping to solve the “drudgery” aspects of medicine, such as automatically drafting SOAP notes and patient messages. Dr. Butte is excited about future applications of LLMs that can help with the “cognitive” aspects: with difficult medical problems an LLM might be able to stitch together disparate pieces of information to generate a potentially novel solution. He also highlights that prompt engineering will become the next “coding language” as so much of leveraging LLMs is knowing how to ask them the right questions. Additionally, Dr. Butte discusses how since 2016, UCSF has been working to deidentify its patient notes so that it can query them to answer clinical questions and ultimately enhance patient care. ⚡The need for patient-facing AI As patients are increasingly able to access their own personal health data in nicely structured formats (e.g., EHRs, wearables), they desperately need more tools to help them interpret and make decisions using that data. Dr. Butte understands that these patient-facing solutions are challenging to get funded but he emphasizes that patients need to receive the benefits of AI sooner. ⚡Evaluating healthcare AI solutions In order to evaluate AI solutions, we often put human specialists – such as medical professionals – on the same tasks. Understanding that specialists often disagree with each other, a significant challenge arises in figuring out how we can evaluate AI considering we can’t just “average” all the specialist opinions. Dr. Butte points out that there still remains a massive gap in AI evaluation tools. Additionally, there are so many organizations that want to have a say in how healthcare AI is regulated that the landscape is uncertain. An awesome conversation with an expert on all things AI meets healthcare. Listen to the full episode below: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wr3643 Apple: https://apple.co/4acwgan

82

8 Comments

One of my proudest moments as an investor occurred today as Alaffia Health announced its series A because it shows how the Aperture® Venture Capital vision of multi-level, multi-generational #impactinvesting is succeeding in the marketplace. Here’s the model in its most basic form : ✅As diverse fund managers with meaningful capital to allocate, we are changing the VC landscape every day just by doing our day jobs. ✅As Black/Brown investors with ~40 years experience collectively, Aperture GPs have access to talent /excellence that others do not, so our portfolio *organically* is more inclusive by race, gender and geography even while optimizing for financial outcomes (all about the alpha). ✅Our most successful portco’s are using financial #innovation to solve market problems that impact underrepresented demographics and underserved communities. Alaffia Health is a shining example of the impact portion of our overall fund thesis, and we couldn’t be prouder of TJ Ademiluyi and Adun Akanni, MPH, PMP - the dynamic brother-sister founder duo whose vision we have steadfastly supported on their journey. Congratulations to TJ and Adun from William Crowder and myself, as well as the whole Aperture team- Marjorie King Philip McKenzie Yves Louis-Jacques Tanvi Lal Michelle Dhansinghani Lisha Bell Katie Kelly Amy Chung Cindy Chong, CFA Brian Fernandes-Halloran Monroe France Jayden Pantel Darren Herman Evan Wladis Neal Triplett Thomas Scriven Peter Ammon Irina Bit-Babik Tim Milanich Rob Rahbari

38

18 Comments

🎙️ Thrilled to share that V. Tyrone Lam, COO of GATC Health, was recently featured on the Innovation Wave Podcast! In this insightful 20’ episode with Bob McGriff and me, Ty delves into how AI-driven predictive analytics can transform our approach to disease treatment, making it more proactive and less risky. He shared compelling insights on the future of healthcare and how predictive tools can lead to earlier interventions and better patient outcomes. A must-listen for anyone interested in the cutting-edge of medical technology and AI! 👉 Check out the episode to learn more about Tyrone's vision and GATC Health's pioneering work in this exciting field. Let's discuss how these innovations are reshaping the landscape of healthcare! #HealthTech #AI #PredictiveAnalytics #Innovation

31

12 Comments

#hiring If anyone knows an awesome engineer that would be interested in joining an emerging #AI company doing important work in #healthcare, please drop me a line! Andy AI is backed by General Catalyst, YCombinator, Greater Ventures, and others, and they’re looking to hire a full stack engineer (US based) who's excited about using AI to improve healthcare and reduce nurse burnout. Andy is AI software that automates clinical documentation for nurses who do home visits. A nurse makes an audio recording of the visit and Andy automatically generates a form that usually takes nurses 90 minutes to complete. Nurses love the product because it potentially saves them 15 hours of charting a week! The founders previously built healthcare AI at Google Health and Apple, and are now building their vision to transform home health. More about Andy AI: https://with-andy.com/ Nurses love it: https://lnkd.in/g9XqZrUq #GenAI #digitalhealth #hiring #engineers #healthtech

16

2 Comments

The adoption of AI will continue to have MASSIVE implications on our healthcare system. Three that stand out to me: Early detection --> AI algorithms are revolutionizing early disease detection by analyzing medical images and patient data with unprecedented accuracy, leading to earlier diagnosis and intervention, ultimately saving lives. Continuous monitoring and surveillance --> AI-powered devices and applications enable continuous monitoring of patients' health status in real-time, allowing healthcare providers to intervene promptly when necessary, especially for those with chronic conditions, thus improving patient outcomes and reducing hospital readmissions. Streamlined operations --> AI streamlines healthcare operations by optimizing resource allocation, predicting patient admission rates, and automating administrative tasks, ultimately improving efficiency and reducing costs. Prime example covered by Morning Brew's Healthcare brew today: How UC San Diego Health Used AI to Reduce Its Sepsis Mortality Rate

9

🌟 This week in the longevity biotech field, Rubedo Life Sciences made headlines with two major announcements: securing $40M in Series A funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and Ahren Innovation Capital to advance senolytics into atopic dermatitis and psoriasis, and a strategic partnership with skincare giant Beiersdorf to develop science-based anti-aging skincare products. 🔬The focus on skin ageing—arguably the most visible indicator of ageing—makes sense as the "low hanging fruit" in the longevity biotech space. However, despite its clear effects, it is still challenging to test many claims. The problem is the vague definition of skin ageing, which includes a long list of ageing phenotypes (e.g. wrinkles, spots, pores, pigmentations, etc) with clear differences in sex, gender, and ethnicity. Chinese women typically develop wrinkles rapidly between the ages of 40 and 50, compared to a more linear development in French women from ages 20 to 60. The lack of reliable scales or testing models also complicate the issue. With FDA regulatory changes aimed at tightening cosmetic skin product testing, the industry could slowly close those gaps and achieve significant improvements in standards. 💡 Rubedo's journey is a great example of a longevity biotech company pioneering the path from bench to bed to market with a platform technology focuses on a clear hallmark of ageing, senescence, with clear leads and clinical applications. This is only because of the potential of integrating great science with practical and pragmatic anti-agieing applications. 👏 Thanks Marco Quarta, for sharing your time and insights during such a pivotal and exciting time. I am inspired by your humility, resourcefulness, and visionary leadership. And congratulations to Ali Siam, and Rubedo team and board, and investors. #LongevityBiotech #AntiAging #SeriesA #SkinCare #SkinDiseases https://lnkd.in/ey7q-K_V

14

2 Comments

The power of three! There are three YC companies that have absolute dream teams consisting of three founders each who happened to announce their existence to the world on the same day. They are working on some of the biggest issues impacting humanity: the creation and education of healthcare providers, agtech/climate, and women’s health. I honestly could not have dreamed up better teams to tackle these massive problems. Synaptiq (YC 23) was started by three friends who have known one another since elementary school: a UCSF-trained physician, an engineer from Square, and an all-star designer. The physician dropped out of Stanford neurosurgery, the hardest residency program to get into in the country, after scoring in the 100th percentile on the board exam and realizing he could use AI to bring his studying methods to other physicians and healthcare workers. Now they have growing revenue and are on track to launch at almost every medical school in the country. Feanix Biotech (YC 23) was initially started by two geneticists who grew up on dairy farms. They came up with new genetic tests for cows and had skyrocketing revenue but realized that the farmers they were working with could make even better breeding decisions. That’s when they met their third co-founder, an MIT/Google ML engineer who was already working on agtech software of her own. Together, they’re now developing the world’s first software + diagnostic platform for agriculture. Simbie Health (YC 23) was started by a Fulbright fellow physician out of uChicago, an operations leader from Carrot Fertility, and a software engineer from Princeton. They’re working on women’s health, creating software that enables women’s health practitioners to start their own, virtual-first practices. Yes, more women’s health, please! Congratulations on your launch! Ryan Phelps, MD, Jacob Caccamo, Kevin Bastoul; Mitchell Angove, Tom Bishop, Meia Alsup;  Natalia Neha Khosla, MD, Rachel O'Driscoll, and Natalia Perina.

229

30 Comments

This analysis, at least anecdotally makes sense to me. In many situations, infringe and holdout is the least painful option for large infringers. The system enables it. - The plaintiff must allocate the time and $$ to assert, taking time and $$ away from selling and developing products. Even if they engage litigation financiers they are limiting their upside potential. - The infringer continues to infringe while employing stall tactics or simply relying on the painfully slow, overburdened legal system. - The cost benefit analysis for infringers - "infringe and pay lawyers" typically outweighs the cost of design around or license. - Enhanced damages and injunctions are rare. - Litigation insurance products reduce risk all around. "The Marcum report shows that there is indeed something wrong with the patent system in the United States but it’s not excessive litigation or patent trolls. The real problem is the inability of patent owners to enforce their rights against infringers. Given the difficulty of obtaining injunctive relief and the limited enhancement of damages, it is unsurprising that predatory infringement has become a standard business practice when, at worst, all an infringer can be expected to pay is a reasonable royalty and, at best, nothing at all."

5

Fundraising has as much to do with "Team" as "Product" & "Market. Sure, VC's/PE's want to see that you have a viable product, in a large and/or growing market. But they also need confidence that the right team is in place to execute on the Mission of the company. I have a client that went out for a $30-40M series B round of funding in early 2023. They were commercial at the time, with a respectable amount of ARR, and were close to FDA approval for a next-gen system that would completely revolutionize their segment of medicine. Even though it was the most difficult funding environ of my lifetime, it was surprising when they did not receive a single term sheet. The CEO (a close friend) autopsied the situation. He was relentless in his pursuit of feedback from investors that said no. When he heard the, "it's too early for us" type responses, he dug deeper. What he realized was the lack of a full time CFO was really hurting him. Investors were reticent to invest in a company that had not set up their ERP. Whose data room was not super organized. Who did not have the proper KPI's set up to manage performance, and to drive revenue acceleration. In early 2024 we helped this client hire a CFO that could do all of this, and also sit shotgun with the CEO, helping him pitch the company during the raise. The series B kicked off again in February. The results were remarkable. In speaking with the CEO this week (5 months into the raise), I was informed they had 3 terms sheets they were considering (all Tier 1 investors). Two of which wanted to take the entire $30-35M round. Here at The Mullings Group we evaluate companies on our proprietary 4 Pillar system: Leadership, Market, Product & Mission. These are the four factors which we believe most impact the success of a early stage company in Med Tech. None are more important than any other. And each contribute immensely to results in the following activities which are critical to success: recruiting, fundraising, ARR creation/acceleration, new tech development. If companies are built with these four factors in mind, it signals that the companies is nor being built to be sold. Instead, a healthy company, is being built which may end up ultimately being purchased. Subtle nuance, but huge difference. #medtech #startup #digitalhealth #medicaldevice #medicaldevices #healthcare #medicine #ARR #recruiting #acquisition

35

2 Comments

The emergence of a large number of small venture funds may indicate that the venture industry is transitioning to a new stage of development. I believe this is an encouraging signal for micro-startups: they are more likely to catch the attention of these micro-funds, increasing their chances of securing early-stage funding and support.

1

🚀DEMO DAY is coming soon! Want to come see what our founders are working on?🎉 Cohort 10 of the What If Fellowship is coming to an end May 17th! We will be showcasing 21 #digitalhealth startups at the earliest stages during demo day! We would love for you to attend. If you'd like to receive an invite, just fill out the typeform below. Who should attend❓ 1) Investors - those looking to invest in healthcare startups 2) Strategic partners / advisors - those who want to advise, help, or partner with digital health startups Demo Day will take place on May 17th at Noon ET remotely via Zoom webinar. We have limited spots, so please sign-up soon if you want to see what our #founders have been working on for the last 2 months! Attendees will see 21 healthcare #startups pitch for 3 minutes each and answer a few investor questions live in front of our audience. This is a great chance to find investment opportunities, and learn more about what the earliest of companies in our space are working on. This is about more than money - some of our founders need advice, advisors, Board members, co-founders and more. So come look for your opportunity to get plugged into the mental health hashtag #startup ecosystem with one of these early stage companies. One thing to point out - we highly encourage investors to attend, and pursue investing directly in these companies. We will NOT stand in the way nor require anyone to invest through What If Ventures to get access to any of these companies. So, please don't feel like we're trying to recruit you to give us money! Sign-up to attend demo day: https://lnkd.in/gEFt5YrY

59

5 Comments

Generative AI and Medically Unexplained Symptoms - a marriage made in heaven, or just another complexity in the lives of this underserved patient group? I’ll be talking about this subject a little later today at the Forgotten Patients: Overlooked Diseases event here in Limehouse. Having been primed by a brilliant meal last night, I’m focussing on the patients themselves. You can check out more here: https://lnkd.in/gvQhJXpT What do you think? Could GenAI help where other tech has failed? Any particular areas or use cases you know about you can share? Move fast and you’ll get a shout out on stage from me ;) #RareDiseases #MedicalDiseases #LLM #GenerativeAI #GenAI #DigitalHealth

27

2 Comments