Tag Archives: Blog

News: Embedded finance will help fill the life insurance coverage gap

  • May 21, 2021
  • by:   
  • in:   
  • note:  no comments 

There’s latent demand for life insurance currently unaddressed by much of the financial services industry, and embedded finance can be the solution.

Melbourne O’Banion
Contributor

Melbourne O’Banion is co-founder and CEO of digital life insurance company Bestow.

An estimated 41 million Americans say they need life insurance but have yet to purchase coverage. Despite this awareness among consumers, the Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association estimates a $12 trillion coverage gap, with about 50% of millennials planning to purchase coverage within the next year.

There’s latent demand for life insurance currently unaddressed by much of the financial services industry, and embedded finance can be the solution. It’s imperative for companies to consider product lines and partnerships to expand markets, create new revenue streams and provide added value to their customers.

There’s latent demand for life insurance currently unaddressed by much of the financial services industry, and embedded finance can be the solution.

Connecting consumers with products they need through channels they already know and trust is both a massive revenue opportunity and a social good, providing financial resilience to families at a time when they need it most.

Why bundle life insurance?

The concept of digitally bundling financial products in a packaged offering to a customer is certainly not new — but it is for the life insurance space.

Embedded finance uses technology and operations infrastructure to offer products and services through entities that may not be financial institutions at all. Think of embedded finance like on-demand shopping; customers benefit from both the transaction (buying financial protection for their families) and the convenience it provides (from whatever platform they are currently engaging with).

Similar to how Amazon saves shoppers 75 hours a year, bundling life insurance gives consumers back time in their day and can improve their financial health.

News: Snap acquires AR startup WaveOptics, which provides tech for Spectacles, for over $500M

  • May 21, 2021
  • by:   
  • in:   
  • note:  no comments 

Snap yesterday announced the latest iteration of its Spectacles augmented reality glasses, and today the company revealed a bit more news: it is also acquiring the startup that supplied the technology that helps power them. The Snapchat parent is snapping up WaveOptics, an AR startup that makes the waveguides and projectors used in AR glasses.

Snap yesterday announced the latest iteration of its Spectacles augmented reality glasses, and today the company revealed a bit more news: it is also acquiring the startup that supplied the technology that helps power them. The Snapchat parent is snapping up WaveOptics, an AR startup that makes the waveguides and projectors used in AR glasses. These overlay virtual images on top of the views of the real world someone wearing the glasses can see, and Snap worked with WaveOptics to build its latest version of Spectacles.

The deal was first reported by The Verge, and a spokesperson for Snap directly confirmed the details to TechCrunch. Snap is paying over $500 million for the startup, in a cash-and-stock deal. The first half of that will be coming in the form of stock when the deal officially closes, and the remainder will be payable in cash or stock in two years.

This is a big leap for WaveOptics, which had raised around $65 million in funding from investors that included Bosch, Octopus Ventures and a host of individuals, from Stan Boland (veteran entrepreneur in the UK, most recently at FiveAI) and Ambarish Mitra (the co-founder of early AR startup Blippar). PitchBook estimates that its most recent valuation was only around $105 million.

WaveOptics was founded in Oxford, and it’s not clear where the team will be based after the deal is closed — we have asked.

We have been covering the company since its earliest days, when it displayed some very interesting, early, and ahead-of-its-time technology: waveguides based on hologram physics and photonic crystals. The important and key thing is that its tech drastically compresses size and load of the hardware needed to process and display images, meaning a much wider and more flexible range of form factors for AR hardware based on WaveOptics tech.

It’s not clear whether WaveOptics will continue to work with other parties post-deal, but it seems that one obvious advantage for Snap would be making the startup’s technology exclusive to itself.

Snap has been on something of an acquisition march in recent times — it’s made at least three other purchases of startups since January, including Fit Analytics for an AR-fuelled move into e-commerce, as well as Pixel8Earth and StreetCred for its mapping tools.

This deal, however, marks Snap’s biggest acquisition to date in terms of valuation. That is not only a mark of the premium price that foundational artificial intelligence tech continues to command — in addition to the team of scientists that built WaveOptics, it also has 12 filed and in-progress patents — but also Snap’s financial and, frankly, existential commitment to having a seat at the table when it comes not just to social apps that use AR, but hardware, and being at the centre of not just using the tech, but setting the pace and agenda for how and where that will play out.

That’s been a tenacious and not always rewarding place for it to be, but the company — which has long described itself as a “camera company” — has kept hardware in the mix as an essential component for its future strategy.

 

News: Linkedin is the reason Apple made the M1 chip

  • May 21, 2021
  • by:   
  • in:   
  • note:  no comments 

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was good fun not only because we had the whole team together to record, but also because we are still basking in the endless glory of our winning a Webby earlier this week. Frankly we are still

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was good fun not only because we had the whole team together to record, but also because we are still basking in the endless glory of our winning a Webby earlier this week. Frankly we are still shocked. But happy-shocked, like when you get a new toy and it is covered in static electricity.

Anyhoo, we had a packed show with much, much left on the floor as we tried to shoehorn the week into our time slot. Here’s what we got into:

The show flew by, much like our days recently, simply because it was so fun and jam-packed with news. And we got to make jokes about our listeners and Monday.com PR timing, so what else could we ask for? Talk soon!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

News: Decentralized Komorebi Collective launches to back female and non-binary crypto founders

  • May 21, 2021
  • by:   
  • in:   
  • note:  no comments 

As decentralized currencies have taken off in recent months, there’s been renewed attention around DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, as a means of bringing together groups of investors who can deploy capital as a unit while voting collectively on those investments. In the spirit of blockchain, they aim to bring greater transparency to investment decision-making.

As decentralized currencies have taken off in recent months, there’s been renewed attention around DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, as a means of bringing together groups of investors who can deploy capital as a unit while voting collectively on those investments. In the spirit of blockchain, they aim to bring greater transparency to investment decision-making.

A number of high-profile DAOs have launched in recent months as crypto mania came to a fervor. Komorebi Collective, launching today, is a new organization founded by women in the blockchain space that will be making investments exclusively in “exceptional female and non-binary crypto founders,” founding member Manasi Vora tells TechCrunch.

The group is comprised of a number of core team members largely assembled from the crypto nonprofit she256 and organization Women in Blockchain, including Vora, Eva Wu, Kristie Huang, Medha Kothari, and Kinjal Shah who will collectively do most of the heavy-lifting behind finding and presenting investments to the group. Other hand-selected members who committed a minimum of $5,000 USD will likely have a lighter commitment.

Each investment will be voted on by all the collective’s key signers, some 36 in total, the majority of which are female.

“DAOs level the hierarchy of a venture fund by ensuring everyone is going to have a seat at the table,” says Shah, who is also an investor at crypto VC firm Blockchain Capital. “We are very careful in approaching the backers that are really mission-aligned.”

Other members of the DAO include firms like Kleiner Perkins, Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, IDEO CoLab Ventures and Stacks Accelerator alongside a number of individuals and founders who work at firms like Twitter, Coinbase, Skynet Labs, Celo Labs and Gitcoin.

The organization itself is built on the Syndicate Protocol, a project that shares some of Komorebi Collective’s backers.

The group hopes the structure of their organization will be able to take a mission-driven approach that improves diversity in the crypto space while proving the sustainability of the DAO model. Despite an explosion in startup investments in the past year, women-led startups received just 2.3% of venture dollars invested in 2020, a study in HBR found.

“There’s so much more room to grow when it comes to female founders getting funding and I want to be part of the solution,” Shah tells TechCrunch.

News: India objects to ‘manipulated’ label on politicians tweets

  • May 21, 2021
  • by:   
  • in:   
  • note:  no comments 

The Indian government has expressed strong objection to Twitter for classifying certain tweets by Indian politicians as “manipulated media,” according to a notice leaked to journalists Friday. The incident comes hours after Twitter labeled a tweet from Sambit Patra, the spokesperson of India’s ruling party BJP, as “manipulated media.” In the tweet, Patra had claimed

The Indian government has expressed strong objection to Twitter for classifying certain tweets by Indian politicians as “manipulated media,” according to a notice leaked to journalists Friday.

The incident comes hours after Twitter labeled a tweet from Sambit Patra, the spokesperson of India’s ruling party BJP, as “manipulated media.” In the tweet, Patra had claimed that Congress, the leading opposition party in India, was using a so-called “toolkit” to derail the Indian government’s efforts against the coronavirus pandemic.

The notice didn’t mention any politician by name nor did it identify any tweets.

In the notice, the Indian government said Twitter chose to designate tweets as “manipulated” even as an investigation hadn’t been conducted and “asked” Twitter to remove such tags in the interest of “fairness and equity.”

India, the world’s second largest internet market, is a key region for many American technology firms including Twitter.

Twitter’s action, the Indian government said, dilutes its credibility as a “neutral and unbiased” platform as well as puts a “question mark on the status of Twitter as an ‘Intermediary.’ Twitter, Facebook, and any other social media firm with over 5 million users are identified as an “intermediary” in India, according to a recently unveiled law.

Twitter, which has labeled several politicians’ tweets over the years to provide more context or correction — citing news media and independent fact checkers — in many markets, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

News: Indonesian agritech platform TaniHub Group harvests a $65.5M Series B round

  • May 21, 2021
  • by:   
  • in:   
  • note:  no comments 

TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get better prices and more customers for their crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI Ventures, the investment arm of Telkom Group, one of Indonesia’s largest telecoms, with participation from Add Ventures, BRI Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Intudo Ventures, Openspace Ventures,

TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get better prices and more customers for their crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI Ventures, the investment arm of Telkom Group, one of Indonesia’s largest telecoms, with participation from Add Ventures, BRI Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Intudo Ventures, Openspace Ventures, Tenaya Capital, UOB Venture Management and Vertex Ventures.

Openspace and Intudo are returning investors from TaniHub’s $10 million Series A, announced in May 2019. The new funding brings its total raised to about $94 million.

Founded in 2016, TaniHub now has more than 45,000 farmers and 350,000 buyers (including businesses and consumers) in its network. The company helps farmers earn more for their crops by streamlining distribution channels so there are less middlemen between farms and the restaurants, grocery stores, vendors and other businesses that buy their products. It does this through three units: TaniHub, TaniSupply and TaniFund.

TaniHub is its B2B e-commerce platform, which connects farmers directly to customers. Then orders are fulfilled through TaniSupply, the company’s logistics platform, which currently operates six warehousing and processing facilities where harvests can be washed, sorted and packed within an hour, before being delivered to buyers by TaniHub’s own couriers or third-party logistics providers.

Finally, TaniFund is a fintech platform that provides loans to farmers they can use while growing crops and pay off by selling through TaniHub. Co-founder and chief executive officer Eka Pamitra told TechCrunch its credit scoring system is based on three years of performance, the company’s agriculture value chain expertise and partnerships with financial institutions.

“More than 100 data points are considered when doing the credit risk assessment. For example, for cultivation financing products, TaniFund tailors each credit scoring based on agriculture risks and market risk of each commodity, on top of the typical borrower E-KYC scoring and process,” he explained. “Beyond credit scoring, having TaniSupply and TaniHub as a standby buyer within the ecosystem also helps to mitigate risk of each loan.  TaniFund aims to further boost its credit scoring system with smarter data processing and better machine learning models.”

Pamitra said TaniHub will use its new funding to build the upstream and midstream parts of its supply chain—in other words, new cultivation areas, processing, packing centers and warehouses. The company will also expand its coverage beyond Java and Bali to source and sell locally, and continue improving its supply-demand forecast model to help farmers plans crop cultivation and timing, with the goal of reducing price fluctuations and maintaining a consistent supply. Pamitra added that TaniHub will also explore precision farming technology.

Over the last couple of years, TaniHub has started exporting several types of fruits and spices to the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and South Korea. This year, it plans to focus on expanding within Indonesia because the F&B (food and beverage) market there is worth $137 billion and the Indonesian agriculture sector is still highly fragmented, Pamitra said.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, TaniHub says it was able to grow its revenue 600% year-on-year in 2020 as demand for online groceries increased.

“We postponed our branch expansion plan and focused on increasing the seven existing warehouses’ since there was a surge of demand on the B2C segment and the process of onboarding farmers. This benefited us since the adoption of purchasing fresh groceries online increased significantly, and the willingness of farmers to work with us became remarkably high because the local traditional markets were closed due to lockdowns,” Pamitra said. “Since COVID-19, the eagerness of provincial governments to open communications for TaniHub to work with local farmers and SMEs in their region has been quite impactful.”

TaniHub is now working with several Indonesian government agencies, including the Ministry of Trade, Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs, to onboard more farmers, F&B businesses and increase exports.

In a press statement, MDI Ventures director of portfolio management Sandhy Widyasthana said, “TaniHub Group has an important role in transforming the agriculture sector and has proven that its presence can deliver positive impact on the quality of life of farmers. We hope our investment can help them continue their work and expand their coverage to more and more farming communities in Indonesia.”

News: BuffaloGrid and Techfugees launch education, solar charging initiative for refugees, aim to raise $3M

  • May 21, 2021
  • by:   
  • in:   
  • note:  no comments 

BuffaloGrid, a startup that provides phone charging and digital content to people in off-grid environments, is teaming up with the Techfugees refugee non-profit to provid free educational content and device charging to displaced people across East Africa and the Middle-East. The initial service will see solar-powered ‘BuffaloGrid Hubs’ deployed in refugee camps across Kenya and

BuffaloGrid, a startup that provides phone charging and digital content to people in off-grid environments, is teaming up with the Techfugees refugee non-profit to provid free educational content and device charging to displaced people across East Africa and the Middle-East.

The initial service will see solar-powered ‘BuffaloGrid Hubs’ deployed in refugee camps across Kenya and Uganda, providing unlimited free access to education and health content, as well as other streaming services and mobile power charging.

The “Knowledge is Freedom” joint campaign has a goal of raising $3 million over the course of the next two years.

Daniel Becerra, CEO of BuffaloGrid, said: “Our mission is to remove barriers for internet adoption and provide the next billion with information, energy, and digital skills. I hope this campaign will raise awareness of the plight of displaced people and how collectively we have the power to change things. The entire team is excited to work with Techfugees. I believe together we have the technical expertise, experience, and connections to make a real difference.”

Raj Burman, Techfugees CEO, said: “In an increasingly digital and climate change stricken world, our mission is to make sure forcibly displaced people don’t get left behind. Around 400,000 marginalized refugees reside in the Rwamwanja and Kakuma-Kalobeyei settlements camp in Uganda and Kenya respectively. Our collaboration with BuffaloGrid presents a unique opportunity for an innovative, responsible digital solution to empower displaced communities with the support of our Chapters in Kenya and Uganda to overcome the access barriers to education and health content to better their livelihoods.”

Techfugees says 80 million people (roughly one percent of humanity) have been displaced because of climate change, war, conflict, economic challenges, and persecution. This figure is expected to grow to over 1 billion displaced people by 2050.

Belfast HQ’d BuffaloGrid has raised $6.4 million to date and counts, Tiny VC, ADV, Seedcamp, Kima Ventures and LocalGlobe among its investors.

(Disclosure: Mike Butcher is Chairman of Techfugees)

News: Rakuten and Beyond Next invest $1M seed funding in farm-to-table startup Secai Marche

  • May 21, 2021
  • by:   
  • in:   
  • note:  no comments 

Farmers and food businesses, like restaurants, deal with the same issue: a fragmented supply chain. Secai Marche wants to streamline agricultural logistics, making fulfillment more cost-efficient and enabling food businesses to bundle products from different farmers into the same order. The company is headquartered in Japan, with operations in Malaysia, and plans to expand into

Farmers and food businesses, like restaurants, deal with the same issue: a fragmented supply chain. Secai Marche wants to streamline agricultural logistics, making fulfillment more cost-efficient and enabling food businesses to bundle products from different farmers into the same order. The company is headquartered in Japan, with operations in Malaysia, and plans to expand into Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. This week, it announced 150 million JPY (about $1.4 million USD) in pre-Series A funding from Rakuten Ventures and Beyond Next Ventures to build a B2B logistics platform for farmers that sell to restaurants, hotels and other F&B (food and beverage) businesses.

This round brings Secai Marche’s total raised to about $3 million. The capital will be used to expand its fulfillment infrastructure, including a network of warehouses and cold chain logistics, hire more people for its engineering team, and sales and marketing.

Secai Marche was founded in 2018 by Ami Sugiyama and Shusaku Hayakawa, and currently serves 130 farmers and more than 300 F&B businesses. Before launching the startup, Sugiyama spent seven years working in Southeast Asia, including managing restaurants and cafes in Malaysia. During that time, she started to import green tea from Japan, intending to sell it directly to customers in Malaysia. But she realized supply chain inefficiencies not only made it hard to meet demand, but also ensure quality for all kinds of ingredients.

Meanwhile, Hayakawa was operating a farm in Japan and working on agriculture control systems that predicted weather and crop growth to help farmers maintain consistent quality.

Both Sugiyama and Hayakawa ended up at consulting firm Deloitte, researching how to create a more efficient supply chain for Japanese agricultural exports to Singaporean F&B businesses. Policies implemented by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s administration aim to increase Japanese agricultural exports from 922.3 billion JPY (about $8.5 billion) in 2020 to 2 trillion JPY (about $18.5 billion) by 2025, and 5 trillion JPY (about $46.1 billion) in 2030.

Seche Marche’s goal is to make it easier for farmers to sell their crops to F&B businesses domestically or overseas.

“We found that not only farmers in Japan, but also all farmers in Southeast Asia have the same problem in terms of the current supply chain,” Sugiyama told TechCrunch. “So we left Deloitte and started our own business to connect not only farmers in Japan, but farmers in all Asian countries.”

Secai Marche’s logistics management tech is what differentiates it from other wholesaler platforms. It uses an AI-based algorithm to predict demand based on consumption trends, seasonal products and farmer recommendations, said Hayakawa. Secai Marche runs its own warehouse network, but mostly relies on third-party logistics providers for fulfillment, and its platform assigns orders to the most efficient transportation method.

This allows F&B businesses to consolidate orders from farmers, so they can order smaller batches from different places without spending more money. About 30% of Secai Marche’s products are shipped to other countries, while the rest are sold domestically.

Secai Marche is reaching out to farmers who want to increase their customer base. About 30% of its products currently come from Japanese farms, 50% from Malaysia and the rest from other ASEAN countries. Sugiyama and Hayakawa said the COVID-19 pandemic affected Secai Marche’s expansion plans because it originally planned to enter Singapore this year, but had to slow down since they were unable to travel and meet with farmers.

On the other hand, many farmers have started selling directly to consumers through social media like Instagram or Facebook, and have approached Secai Marche for help with fulfillment, logistics, repacking and quality control.

News: Mio, a social commerce startup focused on smaller cities and rural areas in Vietnam, raises $1M seed

  • May 21, 2021
  • by:   
  • in:   
  • note:  no comments 

Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, but many major platforms still focus on large cities. This means people in smaller cities or rural areas need to deal with longer wait times for deliveries. Social commerce company Mio is taking advantage of that gap by building a reseller network and logistics

Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, but many major platforms still focus on large cities. This means people in smaller cities or rural areas need to deal with longer wait times for deliveries. Social commerce company Mio is taking advantage of that gap by building a reseller network and logistics infrastructure that can offer next-day delivery to tier 2 and 3 cities.

The startup, which currently focuses on fresh groceries and plans to expand into more categories, announced today it has raised $1 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Venturra Discovery and Golden Gate Ventures. Other participants included iSeed SEA, DoorDash executive Gokul Rajaram and Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, co-founders of Indian social commerce unicorn Meesho.

Rajaram, Aatrey and Barnwal will become advisors to Mio co-founder and chief executive officer Trung Huynh, former investment associate at IDG Ventures Vietnam. Other founders include An Pham, who also co-founded Temasek-backed logistics startup SCommerce, Tu Le and Long Pham.

Founded in June 2020, Mio now claims hundreds of agents, or resellers. They are primarily women aged 25 to 35 years old who live in smaller cities or rural areas. Most join Mio because they want to supplement their household income, which is usually below $350, Huynh and Venturra investment associate Valerie Vu told TechCrunch in an email.

The social commerce model works for them because they are part of tight-knit communities that are already used to making group orders together. On average, Mio claims that its resellers make about $200 to $300, earning a 10% commission on each order, and additional commissions based on the monthly performance of resellers they referred to the platform.

Mio is among a crop of social commerce startups across Asia that leverage the buying power of areas where major e-commerce players haven’t reached dominance yet. For example, lower tier cities fueled Pinduoduo’s meteoric rise in China, while Meesho has built a distribution network in 5,000 Indian cities. Other examples of social commerce areas focused on smaller cities and rural areas include “hyperlocal” startup Super and KitaBeli, both in Indonesia, and Resellee in the Philippines.

Social commerce companies typically don’t require resellers to carry inventory. Instead, resellers pick what items they want to market to their buyers. In Mio’s case, most of their resellers’ customers are friends, family members and neighbors, and they promote group orders through social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram or Zalo, Vietnam’s most popular messaging app. Then they place and manage orders through Mio’s reseller app.

To address delivery challenges, Mio is building an in-house logistics and fulfillment system, including a new distribution center in Thu Duc that can distribute goods to all of Ho Chi Minh and the surrounding five cities in Binh Dong and Dong Nai provinces. Vu and Huynh said Mio can process up to tens of thousands of daily order units at the center. Mio is also able to perform next-day deliveries for orders that are made prior to 8PM.

To lower logistics costs and ensure quick delivery times, Mio limits the number of products in its inventory. The company currently focuses on grocery staples, including fresh produce and poultry, and plans to add FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) and household appliances, too, especially white-label goods that have a higher profit margin.

Mio’s new funding will be used on its distribution center, and hiring for its tech and product teams. The startup plans to add more personalization options for product categories and resellers, so they can build their own brand identities.

News: Telemedicine startups are positioning themselves for a post-pandemic world

  • May 20, 2021
  • by:   
  • in:   
  • note:  no comments 

Telemedicine has faced an uphill battle to become more relevant in the U.S., with challenges like meeting HIPPA compliance requirements and insurance companies unwilling to pay for virtual visits.

Telemedicine, in its original form of the phone call, has been around for decades. For people in remote or rural areas without easy access to in-person care, consulting a doctor over the phone has often been the go-to approach. But for a large swath of the world used to taking half a day off work just for a 15-30 minute doctor’s appointment, it may seem like telemedicine was invented only last year. That’s mostly because it wasn’t until 2020 that telemedicine, in its myriad forms, debuted into the mainstream consciousness.

It’s impossible to predict how healthcare institutions will operate post-pandemic, but with so many people now accustomed to telemedicine, startups that provide services around virtual care continue to be poised for success.

Telemedicine has faced an uphill battle to become more relevant in the U.S., with challenges such as meeting HIPPA compliance requirements and insurance companies unwilling to pay for virtual visits. But when COVID-19 began raging across the globe and people had to stay home, both the insurance and healthcare industries were forced to adapt.

“It’s been said that there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen,” said StartUp Health co-founders Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes in the company’s 2020 year-end report. That statement couldn’t be truer for telemedicine: Around $3.1 billion in funding flowed into the sector in 2020 — about three times what we saw in 2019, according to the report. A health tech fund and insights company, StartUp Health counts Alphabet, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz as some of its co-investors.

Now that people see the benefits and conveniences of “dialing a doc” from the kitchen table, healthcare has changed forever. It’s impossible to predict how healthcare institutions will operate post-pandemic, but with so many people now accustomed to telemedicine, startups that provide services around virtual care continue to be poised for success.

The state of telemedicine

Major players in the field now look at the state of healthcare as, “before COVID and after COVID,” Stoakes told Extra Crunch. “In the post-pandemic world, there’s a significant transformation that’s occurred,” he said. “It’s all accelerated; the customers have shown up. There’s more capital than ever and consumers and physicians have adapted quickly,” he added.

In the U.S., healthcare is first and foremost a business, so while there are treatment approaches that have long been proven to improve patient outcomes, if they didn’t make sense financially, they weren’t instituted at scale. Telemedicine is a great example of this.

A 2017 study by the American Journal of Accountable Care showed that telemedicine can be quite useful for managing healthcare. “The use of telemedicine has been shown to allow for better long-term care management and patient satisfaction; it also offers a new means to locate health information and communicate with practitioners (e.g., via e-mail and interactive chats or video conferences), thereby increasing convenience for the patient and reducing the amount of potential travel required for both physician and patient,” the study reads.

But as we’ve seen, it took a global healthcare emergency to drive widespread adoption of virtual healthcare in the U.S. Now that investors recognize the potential, they are increasingly pouring money into startups that promise to take telemedicine to the next level. Some of the investors backing these newer companies include StartUp Health, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Alphabet, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Maveron, First Round Capital, DreamIt Ventures, Human Ventures and Tusk Venture Partners.

  


Our esteemed clients:

 

 

Proudly powered by Bootstrap | Copyright @ 2007-2024 Digital Pulse Sdn. Bhd.
WordPress Image Lightbox Plugin