#9 - Health Tech
A bi-weekly newsletter containing curated entrepreneurial focused content for students, founders and friends.
The Recap
With a global pandemic sweeping the world, it is extremely important to ensure rapid and consistent innovation takes place in the Health Tech space. This week’s newsletter highlights startups from all over the Boston community working to consolidate individuals information, reduce patients medical expenses, develop new MRI biomarkers, and more. Make sure to check out job and internship opportunities at many of the featured startups at the end of the newsletter! If you’re not already, subscribe below to get future StartOP newsletters!
Featured Health Tech Startups
Founders: Will Ahmed, John Capodilupo, Aurelian Nicolae
WHOOP is a late stage Boston startup with a mission to unlock human performance. WHOOP’s business revolves around a subscription based fitness band that provides users with analytics on how they train, sleep and recover. The current band, WHOOP Strap 3.0, collects data 24/7 and is lightweight, waterproof and has 5 days of battery life. Using your WHOOP band, friends, family members and fitness enthusiast are able to team up and incentivize each other to be active and improve their personal health. WHOOP has also helped popularize the use of HRV(heart rate variability) to identify quantitative metrics to measure your nervous system and body’s readiness to perform.
Founders: Erik Duhaime, Zach Raunsnitz
Centaur Labs offers medical data labeling (classification, segmentation, etc.) from a network of medical experts. Instead of having to choose between the high cost of hiring physicians or the low quality of crowdsourced/blended teams, they offer an alternative that leverages collective intelligence and performance based incentives. Their technology collects multiple opinions per case with labelers competing against each other for cash rewards on the DiagnosUs ios app. This process ensures that quality assurance is baked into the process as the labelers are incentivized to perform at the highest level on every case analyzed. Centaur Labs offers industry leading accuracy, affordable pricing, and very low management overhead on the part of the client, since all engagements include a dedicated customer success manager.
Founders: Codi Amir Gharagouzloo
Imaginostics is a Boston-based health tech startup developing revolutionary magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) biomarkers for the early diagnosis of complex diseases, such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias. Imaginostics’ goal is to advance patient care through their safe, noninvasive quantitative imaging technology. Their technology and software are compatible with existing MRI scanners and hardware. The data they obtain can be used to visualize the vasculature system, stratify patient populations, provide early preventative diagnostics, and assess drug efficacy in clinical trials. Additionally, Imaginostics’ non-invasive quantitative imaging technology enables a full-body health assessment of structural and functional vascular abnormality. They are actively participating in pre-clinical and clinical research in the areas of neuroscience, cancer, and cardiology and are also open to new partnerships with academic investigators.
Highlighted Health Tech Startups
MIT
Ocular was created to improve patient access to eye care through a combination of innovative devices, software, and new care models. Additionally, their development of an automated slit lamp with Ocular-1 cameras enables remote anterior segment exams.
Speetar seeks to establish an innovative regional, multidisciplinary specialist network which aims to integrate more than 14 types of medical specialists. This network will serve patient populations throughout the Middle East and North African region, with an emphasis on suffering war-torn countries.
With only one third of medical patients demonstrating only basic health literacy, Larissa Technologies has developed an AI-driven interactive video course to deliver simple, post-surgical instructions to patients in place of paper instructions that have been shown to be less-efficient.
The Karuna platform consolidates all patient communication into a single system. This supercharges workflows with automation, data integration, and reporting, effectively increasing patient access, boosting staff capacity, and improving Stars/HEDIS metrics.
Harvard
Datavant connects health care data to eliminate the silos of information that hold back innovative medical research, improve patient care and help data owners to manage the privacy, security, compliance, and trust required to enable safe data sharing.
Umbulizer has developed a reliable, low-cost breathing device that has been granted FDA Emergency Use Authorization which can help fulfill global needs for life-saving ventilators.
Northeastern
Pair Team is a platform which monitors health plan and system data with an aim to trigger automated workflows that engage patients to schedule clinically impactful visits, care recommendations to clinicians, and manage follow-up care coordination.
Cortexxus is a wearable medical device company that aims to give doctors access to the neurological data they need to better diagnose, treat, and understand brain disorders.
Mitera is a pregnancy telehealth platform that aims to optimize outcomes for mothers and babies by bringing board-certified physicians specializing in maternal-fetal medicine (MFM) in addition to licensed genetic counselors, midwives, and other specialists to women regardless of their location.
Boston College
Their platform takes a holistic view of a person’s lifestyle in order to help detect and prevent chronic diseases. Their platform also aims to create a better client experience with more successful outcomes while also mitigating cost.
Boston University
Visionairy addresses the core of the physician shortage problem by arming doctors with AI-powered tools that expand their capabilities and help them make quicker and more accurate decisions.
Prism utilizes AI to deliver contextualized trial data and insights. This information leads to better trials, better evidence, and more effective decision-making.
Opportunities
Internships
Reach out to Imaginostics for internship opportunities in marketing and research!
Full Time Positions
WHOOP - Various Positions
Datavant - Software Engineer
Datavant - Marketing
Datavant - Product Manager
Datavant - Product Success
Datavant - Product UX Designer
Datavant - Build Your Own!
Pair Team - Founding Engineer
Pair Team - Founding Navigator (Operations)
Visionary Health - Business Development
About the Author
Alex Marley is a junior majoring in electrical engineering and economics at Northeastern University. Currently he is the Vice President for the Huntington Angels Network, External Relations Lead for Generate, researching neural interfacing devices at Northeastern, an electrical engineer for Paradigm Hyperloop and the founder of the StartOP newsletter. Alex is also working as an electrical engineer at Notch Technologies and interning as a venture analyst for Wiase Capital.