Ashish Gupta

💡Benchmarks in the investment industry serve as a standard for measuring the performance of securities, mutual funds, or investment managers. They provide a reference point for analyzing allocation, risk, and return of a portfolio, enabling investors to make informed decisions. Thanks Peter Walker for keeping us all informed!! Can’t wait for this!! Follow and get on the waitlist for this one! #benchmarks #fundraising #Capitalraise #founders #womenshealth #femhealth #medtech #wellness

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The (Healthcare) Ground Beneath Our Feet… This year it is likely that over $10 billion will be invested in the digital health sector – a robust amount, no doubt, but inconsequential when compared to the amount of capital tied up in healthcare real estate assets, which is estimated to be $1.2 trillion by Jones Lang Lasalle. Of that amount, approximately $790 billion is in the hospital sector while the remaining $490 billion is in medical office assets. It is estimated that there are 48.6k facilities with 3.4 billion square feet of healthcare real estate, 42% of which are owned by REITs and another 33% held by other private investment vehicles. Much of the digital health investment is meant to make the physical healthcare infrastructure more productive: greater operating efficiencies, greater patient throughput, more relevant personalized care models with better outcomes. As the healthcare system is being pushed to be more distributed to lower cost sites of care, accelerated now by the rapid proliferation of automation and AI capabilities, the potential impact on healthcare infrastructure assets will be profound. Thoughts on what that might look like... https://lnkd.in/eTfAdUbS #digitalhealth Flare Capital Partners

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KNOW YOUR REAL BUSINESS ECONOMICS • GAAP Revenue • Cash Flow • Cash • Contribution Margin • CAC • CAC Payback FUNDRAISING: PRESENT & SUBSTANTIATE FINANCIALS • Investor needs to know what your forecasts are • They need to believe them David Weiden, Khosla Ventures

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Excited to announce Frist Cressey Ventures' investment in Qualified Health and privileged to partner w/ SignalFire, Healthier Capital, Town Hall Ventures and others!   Healthcare costs are increasing at a faster rate than ever before, with the US spending nearly twice as other wealthy countries and still ranking bottom in outcomes. It's a story you've all heard - - US healthcare is known for astronomical inefficiencies, waste, workforce supply constraints, fragmented access, appalling patient experiences, and driving patients and businesses into debt.   Yes these problems present opportunities. But opportunities are limited to the system's appetite for change, desire and incentive to try something new and the innovation available. At FCV we believe we've hit the trifecta with Generative AI. Generative AI has given us truly transformational tools in the toolkit and the healthcare ecosystem is demanding to absorb its benefits. This perfect collision of supply and demand means healthcare is poised for big change.   Generative AI is everywhere, it's buzzy, it dangles hope and opportunity. But many things need to be true for the Gen AI transformation in healthcare to take hold, such as but not limited to:   💡 Patient lives and data need to remain safe: We believe in a highly regulated and human life-touching sector such as healthcare we must ensure Gen AI can drive to unrivalled savings and improvements in the quality of care WHILE not putting patient lives or data at risk.   💡 Systems need to own their utilization of Gen AI: We believe systems will use some hybrid of external partners and homegrown solutions but importantly will want full control of data provisioning and utilization as well as the ability to solve an unlimited number of nuanced issues and not cookie cutter algorithms.   💡 Costs need to be looked at on an enterprise level: We believe the speed of innovation in Gen AI means costs will continue decreasing dramatically but at an enterprise level this will still not be a small detail. Systems will want the ability to understand costs and delegate as needed for the outcomes desired at the organizational level.   Enter Qualified.   We knew when we met Justin Norden, MD, MBA, MPhil and team we were standing in front of changemakers. These individuals have lived and breathed the true application and implementation of Generative AI far before we were asking ChatGPT to write our emails. In fact, if you’ve ever driven in a Waymo you’ve benefited from past products this team has built.   Qualified Health is on a mission to enforce governance in Gen AI, allow systems to rapidly build for their needs, monitor and make decisions for all GenAI (homegrown and external) and accelerate the value the sector can glean from these new technologies.   Huge shout out to William T., Tommaso Auerbach and Jamie Kuntz for their hard work!

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Anne Wojcicki, CEO of 23andMe, has announced plans to take the genetic testing company private. This strategic move aims to provide more flexibility in navigating regulatory challenges and to accelerate growth opportunities. The decision follows a trend of health tech companies seeking private ownership to focus on long-term objectives. Wojcicki highlighted the importance of this shift to maintain the company's commitment to innovation and customer-centric services. Taking 23andMe private reflects a bold step towards enhancing its position in the rapidly evolving genomics industry. Read more about this exciting development here: https://lnkd.in/gdrC3a64 #genomics #IPO #privatisation #23andMe

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Q3 is out and Q4 is in!  This is a great read about Base10's strategic switch showcasing how Carta is simplifying fund administration for emerging managers, which is especially important now rolling into the year-end busy season. 

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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

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Hot take on a lot of early-stage digital health companies out there: You're not a tech company. Most tech-enabled care companies I've seen over the past two years are only tech-enabled in the sense that they use telehealth as their delivery mechanism for care. There are exceptions to this, of course - companies who build computer vision and applied AI tools to better the doctor-patient experience, companies who build tooling around risk scoring and stratification to enable more personalized medicine, companies who build truly novel intakes to better route patients to the appropriate care, etc. These companies have real technology chops and, if they sell it right to the market, can get credit for this from investors. But if you're truly a telehealth provider, you need to realize now that the goal post has shifted dramatically from 2021 and you're going to be valued at maturity at something like 3x EBITDA. That's profit. Not revenue. Throw a revenue multiple out the window. That's not the world we live in if you're a virtual doctor's office. Think of how that impacts venture math. If you're raising a seed round at $15M post-money (or $12M pre-money), it means you'll have to generate something like $150-200M in annual EBITDA to be a fund returner for your seed investors. Maybe even more with dilution, since telehealth businesses are not traditionally capital efficient and will likely need to raise material additional capital to reach that scale. You need to be ridiculously profitable (probably on $800M-$1B in annual revenue since you're likely going to be a 40% gross margin business). Here's the good news: you can set yourself up well (and probably be a contrarian founder relative to your peers), by talking about EBITDA growth and how you can grow into a fund-returning outcome based on realistic mature market comps. This will stand out for the investors you're pitching, even at the early stage. This is how you can beat the malaise of the tech-enabled care market. Focus on the right metrics and the right type of growth. You don't have to have all the answers (no founder does), but you need to make sure the ship is headed in the right direction. A focus on profitability for "tech-enabled care" (*ahem* telehealth) businesses is a good first step.

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In vertical SaaS, the very best companies landed with a product solving a specific, burning pain point that horizontal solutions solved badly and then became broad product suites over time (ServiceTitan, Veeva Systems, Doximity, etc). My partner Gordon Ritter calls this “layering the cake”. In vertical AI, the landing wedges are much more brittle. While the painpoints they solve are very real (and often unaddressable by SaaS alone), they’re also much more likely to commodotize in the near term as the tech advances. 👀 Therefore, the need to layer the cake in vertical AI is much more urgent than in vertical SaaS. 👀 The best vertical AI CEOs not only recognize the dynamic, but talk about it openly. Helps those around them keep up the speed of innovation and their eyes on the bigger prize.

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Financing Deals 11/20/24 - 12/1/24 Private Market 💵 Aizen Therapeutics, an AI-driven biotech, emerged from stealth with a $13M seed round led by Wilson Hill, Madrona, and Cercano. The company leverages its DaX™ platform for computational protein design of Mirror Peptides, enhancing stability and reducing immunogenicity for tx applications 💶 atbtherapeutics completed a €54M Series A funding round co-led by EQT Life Sciences and MRL Ventures Fund LLC Fund, with participation from multiple investors. Funds will advance ATB's therapeutic antibody pipeline and expand its ATBioFarm platform for oncology and immunology applications 🧠 Synapticure Inc. a startup building digital health tools for neurodegenerative conditions like ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's, raised $25M in Series A funding led by B Capital . Funds will expand Alzheimer’s and dementia care and grow the company’s reach with partners. Other investors include CVS Health Ventures, RA Capital Management, GV (Google Ventures), & Optum Ventures 🦠 Valora Therapeutics, Inc., a San Diego startup, raised $30M in seed funding co-led by Avalon BioVentures, Bregua Corporation, and TigerGene LLC. Valora focuses on immunotherapies based on sugars to target oncology and immunology, using antibody-lectin chimeras developed from Carolyn Bertozzi's research 🌳 Enveda, raised $130M in Series C funding led by Lux Capital, Dimension, Microsoft, Kinnevik. The company utilizes plant chemistry and machine learning to develop novel therapeutics for conditions such as obesity, fibrosis, chronic pain, and neurological diseases. The funding will support Enveda's pipeline of 10 drug candidates 🇩🇰 Adcendo, a Danish biotech company specializing in ADCs, raised $135M in a Series B led by TCGX. The Copenhagen-based company, with partnerships with Multitude Therapeutics and Duality Biologics, is developing new types of ADCs and plans to enter clinical trials soon. The funding will support the clinical proof of concept for two ADCs targeting tissue factor and uPARAP 💉 Versant Ventures unveiled Pep2Tango Therapeutics, a biotech developing next-gen obesity therapeutics targeting GLP-1, GIP, amylin, and calcitonin receptors. The company aims to overcome muscle mass loss and tolerability issues tied to GLP-1 treatments with its tetra-receptor agonist peptides New Financing Vehicles 🏦 Jupiter Bioventures, co-founded by former NCI Director Norman Sharpless and Nathaniel David, launched with a $70M fund to support early-stage biotech ideas. The fund has already created five projects and aims to turn ten ideas into three successful companies. Investors include Mayo Clinic, Mission BioCapital 🏦 Venrock added $500M to its healthcare investing strategy, separate from its $650M fund announced earlier in 2024. This new fund will co-invest alongside existing Venrock Healthcare Capital Partner funds, focusing on biotech and pharma opportunities For more biotech fundraising news, follow Liam Killingstad

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📈 Demand for fertility services is rising -> 💼 PE recognizes this and wants in -> 🏜 but opportunities are scarce (https://lnkd.in/g6zXEVZh). Highly recommend anyone who wants a deeper understanding of what's going with fertility and fertility tech read Aya Spencer's *2024 State of fertility tech report* (https://lnkd.in/gVjK_UpX) - it's a great summary

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AI and Med Tech in Focus   AI System Developed to Identify Pathology in Tissues Engineers at Washington State University have developed an AI tool that uses images of human and animal tissue to detect abnormalities faster and more accurately than people. The AI algorithm was trained using images from past studies that involved kidney, testes, ovarian, prostate, breast and lymph node abnormalities. The new model detected disease in minutes—current processes take humans several hours and require specialized teams to check each other’s work. It was also found to be more accurate, sometimes detecting instances that humans had missed. The engineers designed the system to handle the processing load of the high-resolution gigapixel images by breaking them down into smaller tiles but still retaining the overall context of the tissue sample—akin to the zoom feature on a microscope or phone camera. Aside from getting diagnostic results more accurately and quickly, the new system also shows promise in epigenetics (the study of molecular processes that change gene behavior without changing underlying DNA). Epigenetic researchers can perform analyses and get results that used to take a year or more in just a couple of weeks. VC Investors are always adjusting their "Play Book" with a variety of options for investing. Mikal Ventures is one of those alternatives, offering curated solutions to real world problems. Reach out if you have questions on how we can be of assistance and bookmark https://mikalventures.com/ for additional insights and information.

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Today, GTMfund’s is excited to announce to launch of Operator, its first incubated company. Max Altschuler (founder of GTMfund) teamed up with co-founder Adam M. (design engineer and 0-1 builder) and co-founder Mark Kosoglow (Outreach employee #1 and former SVP of Global Sales) to create Operator.ai alongside an insanely talented team Pleasant Middelhof, Jeremy Jonas, Carl Gunderson. We've entered a period called “The Great Ignore”. Spam and irrelevant, poorly-automated outbound campaigns are running rampant.   Operator gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.    Check out their website to get updates, early access, and see how they are taking the world back to 2 touches meant to attract buyers into conversations that convert, instead of 20 touches meant to make sure you hit your activity number: https://www.operator.ai/

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Open-source models can be a strong lever for increasing gross margins at AI companies, especially those that have hefty cost structures (e.g., enterprise sales orgs that require significant customer success or implementation resources, as well forward-deployed AI services models common in healthcare and life sciences). One of many reasons to maintain a modular and flexible stack with minimal dependencies when building an AI company. More on the importance of flexibility in the AI stack: https://lnkd.in/eA2XATRk h/t Delip Rao #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #healthcare

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VC Market Update: Riding Out the Post-Boom Bumps. 2021's high-flying valuations and growth have given way to a more complex reality. With longer private timelines, tough exit markets, and capital tightness, startups face unique challenges—but also fresh opportunities. For those navigating today’s VC landscape, strategic planning is key. Whether it's balancing growth with capital efficiency or exploring secondaries smartly, there’s a path forward. And with boosts from AI and future rate cuts, brighter days could be ahead!

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Has Palantir Technologies jumped the shark? Palantir is trading at 27x forward revenues, nearly 5x the Median publicly traded tech company and DOUBLE the Top Ten Median. The stock is up 141% year to date, thanks in part to the AI wave, and has almost quintupled since 2022. And last week it officially made it into the S&P 500. Palantir’s financials are really solid. Their Rule of 40 is 57%, and their revenue is actually expected to accelerate next year. But the valuation they’re garnering goes above and beyond the numbers - it’s about people (namely retail investors) buying into their narrative. And this allows Palantir to pull the future forward. Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp has a cult-like following. And the way he tells the company’s story, shrouded with a heavy dose of mystery, enables him to walk the line between cheap capital and a combustible valuation. Palantir is getting credit for revenues far out into the future. Instead of looking 12 months out, investors are theoretically pulling forward their revenues from a distant far off land, perhaps more than three years out. Make no mistake - this wouldn’t be possible if Palantir was not already crushing it. They’re putting numbers on the board, and have long term contracts with government agencies who aren’t going anywhere. And then, on top of that, they layer in the power of narrative. The best CEOs leverage this as a super power to pull the future forward. As a result, they get access to cheaper capital, employees get rich, and they can invest in their business at a faster rate. In 2020 and 2021, every tech CEO got to pull the future forward (even the not so credible story tellers). Most are still growing into that future they mortgaged. The question becomes how far is too far? When have you lost the plot? When have you jumped the shark? Palantir seems to be teetering on the edge. They trade a full eight turns higher than the next highest EV / NTM Revenue company, Samsara, at 18.9x. Keep in mind - traditionally anything over 10x forward revenue is considered a “premium” valuation. I don't write about picking stocks. I have a team of monkeys throwing darts in the back room who shoulder that burden. I explore metrics, business models and strategic narratives. Palantir operates at the nexus of all three. And the ingredients they’re working with are fascinating. For operators out there working on their own stories, watch this one to see how much is too much before the recipe spoils. You can get all of this week's valuation and efficiency metrics at mostlymetrics.com

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🚨 California Bill AB-3129: A New Era for Health Care Transactions? 🚨 Thanks for the detailed note: Kathryn Edgerton, Deborah Daccord, Karen S. Lovitch The recently introduced California Bill (AB-3129) aims to curb the price increases and lower service quality often linked to such acquisitions. Key Highlights: 🔸 Mandatory Reviews: Private equity groups and hedge funds must notify the AG 90 days before any transaction involving a health care facility or provider group. The AG can extend this period by 45 days, potentially delaying transactions. 🔸 Conditional Approvals: The AG can grant, deny, or impose conditions on transactions if they are likely to have anticompetitive effects or significantly impact access to health care services. 🔸 Prohibitions on Management: The bill restricts physician and psychiatric practices from entering management agreements with private equity or hedge fund-controlled entities. Impact on Digital Health Adoption: The increased scrutiny could slow down the adoption of digital health solutions, as transactions involving tech investments may face delays and additional costs. However, it could also ensure that such innovations prioritize patient care over profit. Cost of Healthcare Provision: While the bill aims to control costs, the additional administrative burden and potential delays might increase operational costs for health care providers, which could be passed on to patients. Consolidation by PE Firms: The bill could deter private equity investments, slowing down the trend of consolidation in the health care sector. This might benefit smaller, independent practices but could also limit access to capital for necessary upgrades and innovations. 🤔 Should Other States Follow? While California's approach aims to protect patients from the negative impacts of unchecked acquisitions, it also introduces significant regulatory overhead. Other states should consider the balance between oversight and operational efficiency, learning from California's experience. This bill is a double-edged sword: aiming to protect patients but risking increased costs and delayed innovation. Other states should watch closely to determine the best path forward. #HealthcareReform #DigitalHealth #PrivateEquity #HealthCareInnovation #CaliforniaLegislation

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With Americans over 65 projected to grow from 58 million to 82 million by 2050, AI solutions like Foundation Capital portco SafelyYou are becoming increasingly crucial. They’re also a powerful answer to the industry’s persistent staffing shortages, acting as a force multiplier for caregivers. The benefits extend beyond individual residents and their families. For senior living homes, SafelyYou’s AI-powered fall prevention and response system translates to longer lengths of stay and higher net operating income (NOI). With AI, we are working towards a future where every individual—regardless of age or health status—receives the highest quality care, tailored to their unique needs and circumstances. Companies like SafelyYou are leading the charge in making this future a reality, and I’m immensely proud to work alongside them as they use AI to build a better world.

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#Longevity Tech is on the rise ✌️ -Endeavor BioMedicines raised $135M at a $795M valuation in April 2024. -Humanaut Health secured an $8.7M Seed round, valued at $52M in May. -Superpower raised $4M, reaching a $24M valuation in May as well. These are just 3 of the 90+ #longevity startups highlighted in Dealroom.co's latest report (Link in the comments). In this newsletter, I dive into the Longevity Technology Market and the emerging trends shaping the future of health! 👉 https://lnkd.in/e3EZrAPH #Longevity #HealthTech #StartupFunding #Innovation

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