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- We asked top investors at firms like A16z and NEA to name healthcare's most promising startups.
- Most of their picks are using AI, automating in critical areas like healthcare hiring and payments.
- Meet the 18 healthcare startups investors have been watching in 2025.
Healthcare investors are chomping at the bit to fund hot startups tackling administrative burdens, workforce shortages, and high medical costs with new technologies.
We asked 10 investors from VC firms, private equity shops, and family offices to identify the most promising healthcare startups of 2025.
Top backers from firms like Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Oak HC/FT were asked to make two picks each: one healthcare startup from their portfolio, and one they have no financial interest in.
Nearly every startup nominated is utilizing AI in their products, from automating hospital back-end tasks to assisting patients with questions about their payments. Healthcare AI startups have dominated digital health VC funding so far this year, capturing nearly $4 billion of the $6.4 billion raised across the industry in the first half of 2025, according to Rock Health.
Here's the full list of the most promising healthcare startups of 2025, according to investors.
AKASA
Nominated by: Julie Yoo, Andreessen Horowitz (an investor)
Total funding: $250 million, according to the company
What it does: Akasa, also known as Akasa Health, aims to automate hospital revenue cycle management using AI.
Why it's promising: Healthcare RCM has been a red-hot market for VC and private equity investment this year. Akasa sells its tech to top hospitals, including Cleveland Clinic, Duke, and Johns Hopkins; Yoo said Akasa has won these customers because the company solves problems other healthcare RCM companies haven't cracked, including full automation of billing and claims processing.
A16z led Akasa's seed and Series A rounds. The startup last raised $125 million in Series C funding in 2022, led by Coatue Management.
Cadence
Nominated by: Austin Walters, SpringTide Ventures (not an investor)
Total funding: $141 million, according to the company
What it does: Cadence helps patients manage chronic conditions with remote monitoring tech and telehealth.
Why it's promising: Cadence now serves over 60,000 patients across 20 health systems, including Hackensack Meridian and Providence. The company told Business Insider that it has seen 100% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025 and is on track to surpass $100 million in annual recurring revenue by 2026.
"They have done a great job of successfully selling into health systems to aid with remote patient care and monitoring of the elderly," Walters said. "While they raised a lot of money in the ZIRP days, they have managed cash well since then, and are a solid player in the landscape."
Carefam
Nominated by: Allison Baum Gates, SemperVirens (an investor)
Total funding: $14 million, according to the company
What it does: Carefam offers an AI-powered hiring platform that connects nurses and other clinicians with open roles, while assisting them with related tasks such as resume review and interview preparation.
Why it's promising: Healthcare faces an ever-worsening workforce shortage, Gates noted. Carefam creates a "best of both worlds" scenario for AI's role in healthcare, she said — using AI to more quickly match people to the right clinical roles that AI can't replace.
The company said it's live across hundreds of healthcare facilities, with more than 30,000 clinicians active on the platform.
Chai Discovery
Nominated by: Vig Chandramouli, Oak HC/FT (no financial relationship)
Total funding: $100 million, according to the company
What it does: Chai builds AI models that predict molecular structures and design new antibodies to accelerate drug development.
Why it's promising: Chai has been off to the races since its 2024 founding. The startup raised a $70 million Series A round in August, led by Menlo Ventures. Thrive Capital, OpenAI, and Dimension led its $30 million seed round the year prior.
Chandramouli pointed to Chai's "exceptional" technical team, comprising a mix of top AI bio researchers and alumni from tech companies such as OpenAI, Meta, and Stripe.
"They've shown quickly and effectively how they can solve problems that previously took many years and millions of dollars," he said.
Clasp
Nominated by: Irem Rami, Norwest Venture Partners (no financial relationship)
Total funding: $50.4 million
What it does: Clasp connects health systems with aspiring clinicians, often while they're still in training, to provide student loan repayment programs tied to post-graduation employment.
Why it's promising: Clasp wants to tackle healthcare's workforce shortage and the student debt crisis at the same time with programs that the company likens to ROTC, but for medicine instead of the military.
Clasp said it's reached $100 million in student loan commitments across top healthcare systems, including Boston Children's Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The company was also named to Business Insider's 2025 list of startups to bet your career on in February.
"By better connecting students with opportunities, Clasp is helping providers build sustainable workforces in a highly competitive environment," Rami said.
Courier Health
Nominated by: Irem Rami, Norwest Venture Partners (an investor)
Total funding: $24 million, according to the company
What it does: Courier Health sells a customer relationship management platform to biopharma companies to help them coordinate and support patients, especially those on specialty drugs.
Why it's promising: Courier Health links fragmented patient and provider data to help drugmakers understand patient journeys and improve medication access and adherence. In 2025, the company said it quadrupled its client base and more than doubled its headcount.
"Courier Health is transforming the way pharma engages with patients by providing visibility across the entire patient journey. Their platform ensures the right patients are connected with the right therapies at the right time, ultimately improving access, adherence, and outcomes," Rami said.
Diana Health
Nominated by: Blake Wu, NEA (an investor)
Total funding: $101 million, according to the company.
What it does: Diana Health offers women's healthcare across gynecology, maternity, menopause, and wellness, with virtual and in-person services.
Why it's promising: Diana partners with hospitals to design and operate women's care programs, pairing nurse-midwives with specialists like OB-GYNs and mental health clinicians for care in the hospitals or at outpatient clinics. The startup raised $55 million in Series C funding in September, led by HealthQuest Capital, to keep expanding its footprint. Diana Health now works with nine hospitals in Tennessee, Florida, and Texas.
Wu noted that women's health, especially maternity care, has historically been a challenging area for startups. He said Diana's model yields better health outcomes for patients while controlling costs.
"We've evaluated dozens of startups in the space, and our view is that Diana's clinical model is unique and highly differentiated," he said.
Inbox Health
Nominated by: Steve Piaker and Kyle Kruse, Ten Coves (an investor)
Total funding: $55 million, according to the company
What it does: Inbox Health automates patient billings for healthcare practices, with AI-powered support tools to help those patients understand their payments.
Why it's promising:
Inbox's AI-powered tools aim to simplify and speed up payments for providers. The company said it's now working with over 3,500 healthcare practices and over 2.8 million patients a year.
Ten Coves led a $20 million growth equity funding round for Inbox Health in October.
"It is our belief that as high-deductible health insurance plans continue to proliferate, Inbox Health's suite of AI-powered patient engagement and payment solutions are well-positioned to scale and address the need for improved patient collections and greater back-office efficiency, a multi-billion-dollar industry pain point," Piaker and Kruse said in an email to Business Insider.
Infinitus Systems
Nominated by: Ilya Fushman, Kleiner Perkins (an investor)
Total funding: $102.9 million, according to the company
What it does: Infinitus builds AI agents to handle administrative tasks, especially phone calls, in healthcare across pharma companies, health plans, and provider organizations.
Why it's promising: Fushman said Infinitus has had a breakout year as it works to automate time-consuming tasks for healthcare organizations, such as benefits verification, prior authorizations, and prescription follow-ups. This month, the startup rolled out new tech for pharma companies selling directly to patients, including providing around-the-clock answers to patient questions about their medications.
Fushman led Infinitus's seed and Series A rounds. He said Infinitus already supports 44% of the Fortune 50, two of the five national payers, and eight of the 10 biggest life sciences companies, and pointed to its partnership with Salesforce, which offers Infinitus's voice AI agents to customers of Salesforce's life sciences cloud platform. "Their enterprise partnership momentum continues to accelerate," Fushman said.
Knownwell
Nominated by: Jannick Dam Mortensen, Maj Invest (no financial relationship)
Total funding: $50 million, according to the company
What it does: Knownwell provides integrated obesity care, including primary care and weight management, in person and virtually.
Why it's promising: As demand for obesity care skyrockets, Knownwell has expanded to 10 brick-and-mortar clinics across the US. The startup announced a fresh $25 million in funding in October, led by CVS Health Ventures and including Andreessen Horowitz, a previous investor, to power its continued growth.
Knownwell also notched a deal in April to offer its weight care services through Eli Lilly's direct-to-consumer digital health platform, LillyDirect.
Mortensen said the company provides a care experience for patients that's "highly individualized and comprehensive."
Nominated by: Ilya Fushman, Kleiner Perkins (no financial relationship)
Total funding: $100 million, according to PitchBook
What it does: Nudge aims to create "whole-brain interfaces," using ultrasound technology to image and stimulate the brain, to enable treatments for neurological conditions such as addiction and essential tremors.
Why it's promising: Nudge has a tall task ahead of it: creating dynamic maps of the brain by combining complex neuroscience with hardware and software. Fushman highlighted Nudge's usage of non-invasive technology for both imaging and precise brain stimulation.
The startup raised $100 million in Series A funding in July, co-led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks, to tackle that challenge.
Nudge's CEO, Fred Ehrsam, previously cofounded Coinbase and is a general partner at crypto VC firm Paradigm. Nudge's founding team also includes a former Neuralink product VP.
In the longer term, Nudge has said it wants to build consumer-grade products to help broader populations better understand their brains in everyday life. The startup didn't respond to requests for comment from Business Insider for this story.
PayZen
Nominated by: Blake Wu, NEA (no financial relationship)
Total funding: $87 million, according to the company
What it does: Payzen works with health systems and physician groups to offer no-cost payment plans to patients for out-of-pocket medical bills.
Why it's promising: Nearly half of Americans find it difficult to afford their healthcare costs, according to a KFF poll published earlier this year. Amid healthcare's affordability crisis, Payzen's approach stands out, Wu said.
The startup uses AI underwriting models to create personalized payment plans that patients are more likely to stick to, thereby increasing revenue for providers.
"Across our investment portfolio, we're looking for opportunities where we can help align incentives and improve outcomes for all healthcare stakeholders, starting with the patient," Wu said. "In our work in the category, PayZen's model emerged as the most unique that we have seen."
Nominated by: Steve Piaker and Kyle Kruse, Ten Coves (no financial relationship)
Total funding: $11 million, according to PitchBook
What it does: RapidClaims sells AI-powered software to healthcare provider organizations to help them capture more revenue.
Why it's promising: RapidClaims is another startup riding the wave of VC interest into healthcare revenue cycle management. Founded in 2023, the startup sells AI tools to automate medical coding, claims management, and denials prevention, among other back-end financial tasks. The startup raised $8 million in a Series A funding round in April, led by VC firm Accel.
Piaker and Kruse said RapidClaims' tech is compelling in its potential not only to speed up cash collection for providers but to eliminate compliance concerns and manual errors in the process.
RapidClaims didn't respond to requests for comment from Business Insider for this story.
Stedi
Nominated by: Julie Yoo, Andreessen Horowitz (no financial relationship)
Total funding: $92 million, according to the company
What it does: Stedi handles and routes transactions between healthcare providers and insurers.
Why it's promising: Stedi is a tech-first healthcare clearinghouse, a central entity that enables doctors to check patients' insurance eligibility, submit claims, track the status of those claims, and receive payment. The startup makes the process more efficient with APIs, which connect disparate software systems, allowing customers to send and receive data via Stedi automatically.
The company said it signed hundreds of new customers in 2025. It also raised a $70 million Series B funding round co-led by fintech company Stripe and VC firm Addition in August.
"We've had a number of highly unfortunate outage events in recent years that shed light on the scale, complexity, and fragility of some of the core, but often legacy, infrastructure systems on which the industry relies. Stedi is one of the upstarts that is giving said infrastructure a seriously needed upgrade," Yoo said.
Stepful
Nominated by: Vig Chandramouli, Oak HC/FT (an investor)
Total funding: Over $50 million, according to the company
What it does: Stepful offers online training for entry-level healthcare jobs, as well as career services to help recent graduates find roles after certification.
Why it's promising: Founded in 2021, Stepful aims to reduce barriers to entry for healthcare jobs by offering short, online, and affordable training programs for positions like medical assistants and pharmacy technicians.
Stepful has introduced AI-powered tools to give students feedback on their work and coach them if they're falling behind. The startup also partners with healthcare organizations on hiring and upskilling their existing workers.
"This is a team that is obsessed with understanding their target consumer and building a product that enables market-leading graduation rates, with over 30,000 students graduated to date," Chandramouli said.
Teal Health
Nominated by: Allison Baum Gates, SemperVirens (no financial relationship)
Total funding: $23 million, according to the company
What it does: Teal Health enables women to screen for cervical cancer at home with at-home kits paired with telehealth support.
Why it's promising: Teal Health received FDA authorization for its at-home cervical cancer screening wand in May, after raising an additional $10 million in seed funding in January.
The wand, the first do-it-yourself cervical cancer testing tool in the US, could help close the gap in cancer screenings. About one in four women in the US are behind on their Pap smears, according to the National Cancer Institute. That care gap is one of the likely contributors to the recent rise in preventable advanced-stage cervical cancer cases.
"I truly believe they are revolutionizing a critical piece of women's healthcare and following in an important trend of the consumerization of women's health and the rising need for women to take control of their own health," Gates said.
Chloe Jackman Photography
Nominated by: Jannick Dam Mortensen, Maj Invest (an investor)
Total funding: $308 million, according to the company
What it does: Twin Health creates AI "digital twins" of patients using data from wearables, lab tests, and other inputs, to care for metabolic conditions like obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Why it's promising: Mortensen pointed to a Twin Health study published in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst in August. Led by Cleveland Clinic clinicians, the study found that Twin Health's programs helped diabetes patients lower their A1C without blood sugar-lowering medications like GLP-1s.
Alongside the study's August publication, Twin Health announced it had raised a $53 million Series E round, led by Maj Invest, to sell to more health plans and Fortune 500 clients. Twin Health is also backed by VC heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, with customers including Dayforce and Blackstone.
Twin Health's founder and CEO, Jahangir Mohammed, previously founded tech company Jasper, which was sold to Cisco in 2016 for $1.4 billion.
Wellsheet
Nominated by: Austin Walters, SpringTide Ventures (an investor)
Total funding: $12 million, according to the company
What it does: Wellsheet uses AI to surface relevant and actionable clinical information from a patient's electronic health record for doctors and care teams.
Why it's promising: Wellsheet is gaining traction as hospitals struggle with clinician burnout and data overload. The startup's tech is live in over 100 US hospitals, including health system Ascension Health. Founded in 2015, the company said it tripled its revenue in the last 12 months, and Walters said Wellsheet has increased its user base fivefold so far this year.
Walters pointed to previous efforts by tech giants like Google to consolidate and analyze health record data.
"Google couldn't solve the real-time enterprise visibility and interoperability challenge at Ascension, but Wellsheet was able to beat out this major tech incumbent because of its unmatched ease of implementation and use — and the fact that the team has developed SaaS that actually works for the way multidisciplinary care teams at hospitals run," Walters said.
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