Ride the wave! Healthcare start-ups are in demand. Corona woke up the whole world and reminded us that we are all mortal. The industry recognized that taking care of our health is priority number one – building social networks, fintech solutions or decentralized metaverses comes second. Therefore, healthcare start-ups got a lot of back wind within the past months, popping up at every corner. Now it is time to ride the wave!
Problem + Solution = Great Business
Yes, it is that simple. Find a problem, solve it, and sell your solution to people with that problem. This is how you start a business – no 3-hour lecture at a university needed for that. Several start-ups in the realm of digital health are doing exactly this and during the past years digital solutions solved plenty of problems! Just to give one example, it is worth looking at mental health start-ups: companies like Lyra Health, Headspace or Likeminded are valued in billions already! All they do is enabling users access to mental health solutions in our complex world. Digital health in Europe brought lots of great start-ups onto the market as well.
But what are the most exciting trends at the moment in the middle of all the healthcare solutions?
In the world of venture capital and start-ups it is easy to get lost in between all the great sounding ideas and investment opportunities. Before looking at specific companies, make sure you are looking in the right sector! Digital health is a broad market and there are key trends that are promising as well as trends that sound better than they actually are.
Heal Capital, a renowned healthcare venture capital fund operating in Europe, identified the right key investment trends and we want to follow along and share some of them with you.
Patient-insights in the world of data are what diamonds are in the world of minerals: highly valuable. Digital health start-ups that are able to collect, process, and bundle real-world-evidence data from patients have a big potential in creating value for all healthcare stakeholders. Big pharma can use the data to emulate case-studies without having to use additional volunteers which saves cost and time. Insurers use patient data to optimize their financial models and predictions. Eventually, patients benefit from tailor-made medical treatments or insurance offers. Keep your eyes open for digital health start-ups operating in the niche of patient-insight data!
Treating patients remotely is probably the biggest trend emerging since the pandemic started. Since digital solutions can overcome physical distance, it makes the life of old or just busy people a lot easier who would instead have to go to the doctor in person. Telemedicine is here to stay – it is far more than a trend that came and disappears again. However, telemedicine needs to go further: Patients must be able to have diagnostic options provided for them at home and therapy delivered to their homes. Only in this way can telemedicine 3.0 function as a holistic approach. Remote monitoring of vital stats also belongs to telemedicine and is an area where venture capitalists investing in digital health are seeing a lot of potential.
With a wide variety of medical data through tests and surveys completed by users, there comes the need for processing this data. Artificial intelligence can help us understand data, connect the dots, and predict health issues in time. There are multiple use cases for AI in healthcare: from visual analysis over forecasting illness to analyzing your vision, digital health and AI have the potential of solving plenty of problems.
Globally there are too many people that need to be taken care of while there is a shortage of caregivers. As humans, we understand how to use machines and technology to “replace” and assist us. We are doing it very efficiently in manufacturing already! Caregivers have a lot of work and the demand for solutions to support them is big. Digital devices that replace or assist manual labor are a valid business model for healthcare start-ups and as an investor you should be looking out for solutions like this as well.
As you see, there are some sectors that the experts are betting their money on because they show the biggest added value for our society. You can follow the masses and diversify your money by investing in the MSCI World that holds all over-valued companies on the earth in one big basket. Or you can do some research and identify sectors, niches and businesses that have both: potential to grow AND a reasonable price tag. Start-ups in general are fulfilling these criteria.
Aescuvest is investing in companies that are covering the key trends in digital health that venture capital funds believe in as well. We do our homework. For you.