BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–SpringTide Ventures, a leader in early-stage HealthTech venture capital, today announced the successful close of its Fund II at $65 million, bringing its total assets under management to over $100 million. This new fund underscores the firm’s continued commitment to driving innovation and elevating health globally through investments in digital health, medical devices, life sciences, and tech-enabled care delivery.

“Fund II presents an exciting opportunity to deepen our impact on human health by partnering with entrepreneurs who are positively disrupting healthcare,” said Austin Walters, Managing Partner at SpringTide Ventures. “This milestone is not just a reflection of our past successes but a testament to the commitment of our team, partners and founders to bring transformative solutions to market that enhance patient care, improve outcomes, and expand access to quality care.”

Noteworthy achievements from SpringTide Ventures’ portfolio include:

• GreatExpectations.io: The world’s leading data quality tooling company recently surpassed a rate of over 15 million downloads per month.
• Pathology Watch: An end-to-end dermatopathology software platform, including AI interpretation; acquired by Sonic Healthcare in January 2024 for $150 million.
• Debut Biotech: A leading cell-free biomanufacturing company that launched its own skin care product line in 2023 and raised a $20 million Series B led by L’Oreal.
• OpenLoop: An end-to-end telemedicine enablement company surpassed $100 million in annualized revenues in early 2024.

“We are so proud of the extraordinary achievements of our current founders and partners and are inspired by their commitment to grow and scale,” added Walters. “As we venture into this new chapter, our resolve is stronger than ever to support entrepreneurs in challenging the status quo and bringing life-changing technologies directly to those who need them most.”

SpringTide Ventures strategically aligns its investments by engaging with industry experts and insiders to identify key trends and untapped opportunities. The firm then proactively seeks out founders and entrepreneurs at the forefront of healthcare innovation, particularly those harnessing advanced technologies to address pressing challenges. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, next-generation sequencing, and flexible electronics are leveraged to create solutions that enhance patient care, improve health outcomes, and broaden access to quality healthcare services. This refined approach ensures that SpringTide Ventures contributes to the advancement of healthcare and supports the growth of businesses poised to make a significant impact in the industry.

For more information about SpringTide Ventures, visit: https://springtide.com/.

About SpringTide Ventures

SpringTide Ventures is an investment firm dedicated to supporting the world’s best healthcare innovators. Based in Boston, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco, the firm currently has $100 million in total assets under management, focusing on early-stage investments in digital health, medical devices, life sciences, and tech-enabled care delivery. For more information, visit https://springtide.com/.

Contacts

SpringTide Communications
josh@springtide.com

Reed Jobs, the 31-year-old son of Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, is making headlines with his new venture capital endeavor focused on revolutionizing cancer treatment.
His firm, ‘Yosemite‘, named after the famous national park where his parents got married, has already closed its first fund at an impressive $200 million.
With the support of renowned institutions like MIT and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, as well as experienced investor John Doerr, Yosemite is poised to have a significant impact on medical innovation.

We’re on a mission to lead the next chapter in the fight against cancer,” Reed Jobs said, “forming our standalone entity gives us the flexibility to best drive great ideas to scale.

This venture carries a deep personal meaning for Reed Jobs, as the passing of his father to pancreatic cancer in 2011 motivated him to seek new ways of combatting the disease. Previously studying to become a physician, Reed shifted his focus to history after the loss. In 2004, he joined his mother to form Emerson Collective, through which he engaged in impact investing and philanthropic endeavors.

I had never ever wanted to be a venture capitalist,” Reed Jobs told the New York Times’ Dealbook. “But I realized that when you’re actually incubating something and putting it together, you can make a tremendous difference in what assets are part of that, what direction it’s going to take, and what the scientific focus is going to be.

Yosemite emerges as an offshoot of Emerson Collective, with Reed Jobs, formerly the managing director of health within the organization, now extending his mission through this new venture. While Yosemite will operate as a for-profit entity, it will also maintain a donor-advised fund, allowing for grant funding to support scientists and innovative research in the field of cancer treatment.

By nurturing innovation and actively participating in the commercialization of groundbreaking discoveries, Yosemite aims to generate scientific advancements and potential financial returns.
Reed Jobs’ move into venture capital and medical innovation not only honors his father’s legacy but also paves the way for transformative breakthroughs in cancer treatment that can benefit patients and medical professionals alike.

Partners Edward Kliphuis and Simon Turner will lead the new investment strategy, deploying their extensive experience in the sector

Sofinnova Digital Medicine is the sixth and newest addition to Sofinnova’s multi-fund platform of investment strategies spanning the life sciences sector from seed to later-stage investments

PARIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sofinnova Partners (“Sofinnova”), a leading European life sciences venture capital firm based in Paris, London, and Milan, announced today that it has launched a new investment strategy focused on digital medicine. The strategy will be headed by Partners Edward Kliphuis and Simon Turner, who bring over a decade of experience investing in startups at the intersection of biology, data, and computation.

Sofinnova Digital Medicine will back entrepreneurs innovating at the cutting edge of technology and biology and help them scale to become global leaders. Like all the funds on Sofinnova’s platform, Sofinnova Digital Medicine will focus on developing the most promising innovations that address systemic challenges in healthcare and can profoundly improve the lives of patients worldwide.

Antoine Papiernik, Chairman and Managing Partner of Sofinnova Partners, said: “Digital medicine is revolutionizing the healthcare industry. With our new partners, our network and our expertise across the healthcare continuum, we are uniquely positioned to help entrepreneurs develop digital products and services that will help patients, physicians and healthcare systems overall.”

Edward Kliphuis, Partner in the Sofinnova Digital Medicine Strategy, said: “We’re building this strategy from Sofinnova’s undisputed foundation of life science expertise, spanning more than 50 years and an extensive network of entrepreneurs and investors. Simon and I bring our extensive experience investing in and developing companies at the forefront of biological innovation coupled with powerful computational techniques to help founders achieve product-market fit and scale their companies globally.”

Simon Turner, Partner in the Sofinnova Digital Medicine Strategy, said: “We designed this strategy to help founders leverage our knowledge of highly-regulated, complex healthcare industries and build on the strengths of tech-industry approaches like rapid product iteration and swift commercialization. Sofinnova Digital Medicine will respond to the challenges of overburdended health systems with speed, agility, and a deep understanding of the patient journey.”

The launch of Sofinnova Digital Medicine marks the firm’s sixth and newest strategy in its multi-fund platform which spans the life sciences sector, from seed to later-stage investments in the most promising and disruptive technologies.

About Sofinnova Partners

Sofinnova Partners is a leading European venture capital firm in life sciences, specializing in healthcare and sustainability. Based in Paris, London and Milan, the firm brings together a team of professionals from all over the world with strong scientific, medical and business expertise. Sofinnova Partners is a hands-on company builder across the entire value chain of life sciences investments, from seed to later-stage. The firm actively partners with ambitious entrepreneurs as a lead or cornerstone investor to develop transformative innovations that have the potential to positively impact our collective future.

Founded in 1972, Sofinnova Partners is a deeply established venture capital firm in Europe, with 50 years of experience backing over 500 companies and creating market leaders around the globe. Today, Sofinnova Partners has over €2.5 billion under management. For more information, please visit: sofinnovapartners.com.

About Edward Klipuis

Edward joined Sofinnova Partners in 2021. He came from M Ventures, Merck KGaA’s corporate VC arm, where he focused on investments in cutting-edge digital medicine companies, including developers of the first FDA-approved videogame therapy. Before that, Edward was in the Life Sciences securities team at Kempen & Co, a pan-European merchant bank, covering listed small- and mid-cap life sciences equities. He started his career as an analyst within the biopharma investment team of M Ventures. He holds an M.Sc. in Biopharmaceutical Sciences from Leiden University, The Netherlands, with a specialization in pharmacology.

About Simon Turner

Simon joined Sofinnova Partners in 2021 after consulting for corporates seeking to develop partnerships with digital health companies. He worked closely with business development functions to identify, assess, and structure strategic investments. Prior to that, Simon was at Baxter International, where he was part of the External Innovation Department. He has worked with various innovation agencies and chaired financing panels. He has a B.Sc. in Biomedical Science from King’s College London and an M.Sc. in International Business from SKEMA Business School.

Contacts

Bommy Lee
Head of Communications
Sofinnova Partners
blee@sofinnovapartners.com
+33 (0) 6 47 71 38 11

North America
RooneyPartners LLC
Kate Barrette
kbarrette@rooneypartners.com
+1 212 223 0561

United Kingdom
Optimum Strategic Communications
Hollie Vile
sofinnova@optimumcomms.com
+44 (0) 20 3922 0900

France
StrategiesImage
Anne Rein
anne.rein@strategiesimage.com
+33 (0) 6 03 35 92 05

Italy
Havas PR Milan
Pierluigi Cavarai
pierluigi.cavaraiext@havaspr.com
+39 (0) 392 77 999 33

The digital health innovation division of Healthware Group worked on this digest, uniting all important news in a clickable format.

An easy to read document aimed at reflecting back on the big news from the digital health ecosystem. In particular, you will learn:

and much more!

Milan, January 7 2022 – 1000Farmacie, the pharmacy marketplace that brings together the best Italian pharmacies on an online platform, offering customers a wide choice of products, fast delivery, and value for money, closed a USD 15 million financing round. The round was led by P101 SGR – through its second fund P102 and ITALIA 500 (a venture capital fund created by Azimut Libera Impresa sgr and managed by P101) – and by the Swiss-based investment company HBM Healthcare Investments.

Switzerland-based family office Corisol Holding, Club degli Investitori (which invested through Ersel group’s Simon Fiduciaria), IAG, LIFTT, and Healthware Ventures (that invested in the seed round), also took part in this Series A round. The start-up company had previously closed a USD 1.7M seed round in April 2020 and has raised around USD 17 million to date.

The company will use these funds to expand the business and its last-mile delivery service. 1000Farmacie will build out its widespread network of partnerships with local pharmacies. This business model was inspired by US startup PillPack, which was acquired by Amazon in 2018. Furthermore, 1000Farmacie aims at supporting patients by integrating additional services within its digital healthcare platform by 2023.

The Italian pharmaceutical market is highly fragmented. Most of the 23,000 independent pharmacies do not run an online shop and have limited stocking capability. 1000Farmacie’s technology brings together the best performing independent pharmacies onto a single platform, combining the largest selection of products with rapid delivery. 1000Farmacie excels at customer satisfaction by partnering only with pharmacies that share its customer-centric mindset.

1000Farmacie was founded by CEO Nicolò Petrone, who previously exited the fintech platform MEDICI to the unicorn Prove, alongside Mohamed Younes (COO) and Alberto Marchetti (CMO). The company has grown exponentially since it was founded in March 2020, with sales growing by 600% last year. With a network of over 100 independent pharmacies located in major Italian cities and 95,000 products for sale, 1000Farmacie has now reached more than 250,000 customers. The start-up collaborates with multiple pharma players, which use the platform to deliver medicines to patients more efficiently.

1000Farmacie is part of the growing e-pharmacy and digital healthcare market that has a potential value of EUR 180 billion in Europe, however, its online penetration is still close to zero (source: Sempora). It is in fact a market strongly linked to offline sales (over 200,000 products have been sold in more than 50,000 brick-and-mortar stores in Europe), and with a rather low presence of digital marketplaces. In Italy in particular, the potential for development is enormous: in fact, the penetration rate of the e-pharmacy sector is growing fast: between 2018 and 2020 it grew by three times.

Our mission is to serve our customers and improve the overall shopping experience: thanks to this financing round we will be able to significantly expand the range of services we offer, innovating a sector that is still underdeveloped in terms of digitalization.  In Italy, the same medicine displays vast differences in price between pharmacies. We made this price distortion visible, so now the customer can always find all the products he or she is looking for at the best price., stated Nicolò Petrone, CEO of 1000Farmacie.

“The potential and high growth rates of the e-pharmacy market prompted us to invest in 1000Farmacie without any hesitation. We are confident that, this company will soon hold a leading position, also thanks to the skills of its management team. We are proud to take part to its growth right from the start. We love projects that can ‘rejuvenate’ their reference markets by bringing a wave of technology and innovation: 1000Farmacie is certainly one of those”, added Giuseppe Donvito, Partner of P101SGR.

“We are pleased to bring our global expertise in the digital healthcare segment to 1000Farmacie. HBM has been an early investor in the Indian pharmaceutical marketplace Tata 1mg, in the leading Latin American digital healthcare company Farmalisto, as well as in Jianke, China’s leading digital healthcare and telemedicine company. In addition, HBM is also an early investor in the US-based digital Healthcare Workplace platform ConnectRN”, concluded Matthias Fehr, Head of Private Equity at HBM Partners, Switzerland.

Today in conjunction with the release of his presentation, that is a joint effort of the investment bank Stout and Digital Health Ventures (DHV), we will touch base on some key points of his keynote. 

Min-Sung is a Managing Partner at Digital Health Ventures (DHV), a specialized Venture Capital fund based in Berlin. Min-Sung’s international investment experience ranges from early-stage, to late-stage. Min-Sung is passionate about opportunities in Digital Health and is both enthusiastic about the immense value creation potential through digital technologies as well as the resulting positive impact on society.

Since 2013, Min-Sung invested in successful Digital Health companies such as mySugr, NeuroNation, Mimi, Medbelle, hi.health and Amwell (IPO 2020). Before joining DHV as Managing Partner, Min-Sung was responsible for the Berlin office of Samsung Catalyst Fund and helped in creating AllianzX (USD 1.0 bn assets under management). Min-Sung studied Management and Business at Witten/Herdecke, Harvard, St. Gallen, and in Seoul.

Mathis is a Managing Director in the Investment Banking group at STOUT and a senior member of the global technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) practice. He has advised on more than 30 transactions for family-owned, sponsor-backed, early-stage, and public Fortune 100 companies, successfully executing M&A transactions and financing assignments exceeding $15 billion in value.

Mathis brings deep expertise in international transactions across numerous industries, with an emphasis on TMT and Digital Health in particular. Within the past 18 month Mathis and his team have led six successful digital health transactions, with clients such as Ada Health, PlusDental and NeuroNation and others. In this role Mathis engages in frequent conversations with both leading financial investors as well as strategic parties within the space.

Prior to joining STOUT, Mathis served as Executive Director at a European corporate finance and investment advisory firm for middle market clients and entrepreneurs with focus on the technology and media sector. Prior, he led the European TMT sector coverage within the investment banking division of IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG in Frankfurt. Mathis studied Business and IT at EBS and holds an M.B.A from China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.

Dr. Keck is CEO of SYTE the Strategy Institute for Digital Health (www.ehealth-syte.com). He is an internist, cardiologist, scientist, founder and experienced international business consultant for large healthcare oriented companies. He co-developed innovative technologies which are now being used globally. After his time as an interventional cardiologist Dr. Keck joined the Boston Consulting Group and then became CEO at SYTE.

Dr. Keck is still deeply involved in scientific research including artificial intelligence algorithms working with unique datasets including genetic, clinical, lab and elektrophysiological data.

What are the next biggest changes and trends in digital health? (MSK)

We’ll see more incumbents, traditional healthcare players, be it pharma, medtech, or provider, vertically implement digital solutions or expand their offering with digital – both b2c and b2b. Every healthcare company will become a digital health company. Healthcare itself will become more digital which opens room for start-ups and innovators.

It’s quite different to launch a start-up in digital health now compared to 10 years ago. There’s lots of capital to fund daring ideas. There’s a clearer reimbursement and regulatory process for digital solutions.

An actual ecosystem with experts and founders working on second or third digital health start-up. This will affect the quantity and quality of the digital health innovation we’ll see.

The focus of innovation will change. There are plenty of digital health verticals in which we have mature companies (for example, Hospital Information Systems, Practice Management System) but plenty of early-stage verticals: Bio-Informatics, Clinical Decision Making systems, or Digital Therapeutics.

I am especially excited about Germany’s digital health eco-system and its new digital reimbursement act: With its largest EU healthcare market, Germany will be the engine for the European rise in digital health. In comparison to England, Germany has a much bigger market (England 55.98mn versus 83.24mn) and Germany’s regulatory standards are aligned across the EU. Historically, the UK has had the highest number of VC backed deals for digital health in Europe. This is about to change – Exciting times are ahead of us.

Digital health funding smashed another record this year. What kind of trends have you noticed in the digital health funding space in the last few years and how have the pandemic been impacting health innovation funding? (MSK)

Well – there is a lot more capital in the ecosystem than ten years ago! Most digital health companies back then were early-stage, now we have companies raising hundreds of millions to scale their – heavily validated – product. Yes, it’s without question: The pandemic acted as catalyst and demonstrated the need for and value of digital health solutions. And of courses, when there’s value, investors are coming. But … I see the pandemic as an accelerator, speeding up certain developments that would have happened anyway, maybe a few years later. But independent of the pandemic, we need digital solutions and infrastructure to increase the quality of care while reducing its costs. It’s a necessity if we want to keep our healthcare system running.

So once this pandemic is over, I believe there will be even more mega deals in the future, but with the current infrastructure and a maturing ecosystem (capital, expert networks, reimbursement systems, founders working on their second or third digital health start-up), we’ll see plenty of very exciting early-stage start-ups tackling the myriad of healthcare problems that still exist (we’ll also see lots of investors funding them).

In 2021 we recorded a large number of mergers and several companies went public, either taking the traditional route or merging with special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). Which are the factors pushing Health tech investors and innovators to move into the SPAC field and which fundraising climate can digital health companies expect in 2022? (MW)

Overall, the year 2021 has been historic for digital health venture funding, with all of digital health’s previous annual funding records topped mid-year already. Besides the fundraising dynamic itself investor appetite was also influenced by major changes to the business models, infrastructure and talent pools that will have long-lasting effects on the respective companies themselves as well as the sector as such. These factors also fuelled a new record level of exit activity in 2021, where 23 digital health exits took place via merger or acquisition on average each month, doubling the previous year’s figure. Also, 23 digital health companies went public via SPAC or IPO in 2021, tripling the previous year’s figure. The general trend toward digital healthcare solutions was further accelerated by an unseen inflow of capital seeking exposure to growth and digital health companies for which SPAC’s proved to be a very efficient way to immediately deploy capital. With the SPAC market slowing down most recently, we see the negotiation leverage moving stronger towards the leading digital health companies that can choose between multiple SPACs, the traditional IPO path as well as substantial private funding in 2022.

The benefits of digitalization for the healthcare sector are now widely acknowledged, the next challenge is to scale the use and increase profitability. How do you see the paths  for innovative apps e.g. into regular care and thus statutory reimbursement as gradually undergone by several countries? (AK)

One main trend is to significantly increase the revenue of pharmaceutical and medtech products by making advanced Digital Health an integrated part of the product. This trend can be seen globally, from the Americas over Europe to South East Asia. In order to be fast to market, Pharma and Medtech are currently conducting Digital Health specific Due Diligence activities globally. Another trend is to get direct reimbursement for a Digital Health functionality, as mentioned in your question. For this, in Germany the clearest pathway globally has been established by law making the largest European healthcare market an absolute forerunner for insurance paid prescription of Digital Health with very attractive prices. France already has announced to use a similar reimbursement scheme and more countries will follow.