In the first half of 2024, the digital health sector’s fundraising numbers appeared to be normalizing for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic. This year’s digital health venture funding dollars are on pace to exceed the totals from 2019 and 2023, which are useful comparators outside of the pandemic-era funding cycle of 2020 to 2022.
The digital health sector’s return to a healthy investment pace seems to be continuing into the second half of 2024. Last week, AI precision surgery platform Caresyntax closed a particularly large round. The company, founded in 2013, closed a $180 million Series C extension round, bringing its Series C fundraising total to $310 million.
The latest round consisted of $80 million in equity and $100 million of growth debt tied to specific company milestones. The firm’s total fundraising amount to date is $387.50 million.
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Caresyntax — which is based in San Francisco and Berlin — seeks to improve patient safety for those undergoing surgery and make hospital operating rooms more efficient, said Bjoern von Siemens. He is the company’s co-founder, as well as its CFO and chief business officer.
“Around 15% of surgical operations result in patient complications and around 4 million people die each year as a result of postoperative complications. A significant reason for this is that care providers lack holistic insight into the patient — even if the data that could drive better outcomes exists, they may not have access to it,” von Siemens explained.
In his view, the fragmented data ecosystem in an operating room is a massive issue.
Even though hospitals spend billions annually on operating room devices, the data collected by these devices is usually siloed, thus limiting providers’ ability to enhance patient outcomes and reduce the cost of surgical services, von Siemens pointed out.
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“Operating rooms are extremely underutilized, surgeons and support staff are overworked, and patient outcomes are divorced from operational and financial data that a hospital needs to make meaningful improvements,” he remarked.
By unifying operating room data on a single platform, Caresyntax is on mission to help hospitals operate more efficiently and profitably, von Siemens explained.
From the perspective of a surgeon, Caresyntax’s technology serves as a copilot to support them and their care team before, during and after surgery, he said. The company’s AI platform harmonizes data from the various software and hardware tools in and around the operating room to keep the surgeon well-informed and ensure the patient is getting personalized treatment.
“Before and after the surgery, it provides enhanced data analytics and real-time AI capabilities that is similar to what you would have if you were the pilot of a plane — it helps identify the right tools, procedures and so on to reduce the mental burden on the surgeon and ensure that all steps in the procedure are completed according to best practices,” von Siemens stated.
After the procedure, Caresyntax provides information that helps the care team understand the patient’s risks and the type of care they will need to recover.
That functionality is crucial considering that most complications and deaths from surgery don’t occur during the procedure itself, but rather during the post-operative recovery phase, von Siemens noted.
“In short, we help hospitals boost their profitability while enhancing patient outcomes. This is critically important because surgeries account for about 30% of health system costs, so even a marginal improvement in the number of cases that a hospital can handle can result in millions of dollars in cost savings per year,” he said.
He also noted that the same is true for risk. Patient harm and complications can result in significant increase in the cost of surgery, so having technology to ensure safety also has a material effect on a hospital’s bottom line, von Siemens added.
He argued that Caresyntax has no direct competitors, saying that the company’s surgical AI platform is more comprehensive than others on the market.
“For instance, Intuitive Surgical, which builds operating room robots, could be considered a competitor, but they focus purely on robotics and have a closed platform. The same is true for Epic or Vitas, which also exist as closed data ecosystems,” von Siemens declared.
He noted that Caresyntax is an open API platform, adding that the company is “very happy” to share data. He pointed out that most medical device companies don’t take this approach, instead opting to create “extremely proprietary closed surgical systems.”
To von Siemens, Caresyntax’s open ecosystem approach will help it stand out from other players on the market. He said the company is preparing for an eventual IPO, with the timeline being at least 18 months from now.
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