By StartUp Health’s reckoning, New York City was the second most active city for health tech dealflow in 2017 with $1 billion invested across 63 deals. San Francisco had nearly twice the number of deals and more than three times the amount, but the closest to New York was Boston with 29.
So who are the big players in healthcare investment in the Big Apple? A new report from New York Healthcare Business Leaders breaks down some of the larger investors across life science and healthcare.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
NYCHBL estimated that life science and health tech accounted for $13.8 billion across 412 deals last year across the country. As for New York City, 79 startups and growth stage companies received $703 million last year.
Orbimed, New Enterprise Associates, Venrock, Deerfield Management and Canaan Partners were named as the top investors, accounting for 25 percent of healthcare and life science deals. One caveat is that most venture firms don’t stick to one coast or city. NYCHBL acknowledged that reality in its methodology for selecting the leading venture investment firms for healthcare and life sciences. Although all of the firms on the list have offices in New York, they also tend to be bicoastal and/or international.
On the health tech side, the five largest investors by deals between 2010 to 2017 are: New Enterprise Associates with 26 deals, Venrock (21), New York Digital Health Innovation Lab (19) Oxeon Partners (16) and Great Oaks Venture Capital (16).
AbleTo, a behavioral health business, secured the most investment for a New York-based health tech company last year, raising $36.6 million in a Series D round to expand its customer base. Automated patient check-in service Phreesia. was a close second with $34 million from investors such as private equity firm LLR Partners and Echo Health Ventures. Predictive analytics business Prognos, formerly known as Medivo, raised $20.5 million in a Series C round, which attracted strategic investors such as Cigna and GIS Strategic Ventures — the venture capital arm of the Guardian Life Insurance Company. On-demand pharmacy Capsule raised $20 million and Imagen Technologies raised a little more than $14.3 million.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
New York Digital Health Innovation Lab was previously known as the New York Digital Health Accelerator.
The report also points to initiatives in the past couple of years designed to stimulate the life science startup ecosystem in the city. For example, Mayor Bill de
Blasio allocated $500 million for LifeSciNY. Alongside networks for health tech startups such as StartUp Health and New York Digital Health Innovation Lab, life science incubators are on the rise in New York as well. NYCHBL President Bunny Ellerin called attention to Alexandria Launch Labs, BioLabs New York, and noted that this year, JLabs is expected to open offices at the New York Genome Center.
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