Healthleap, a startup building an SI platform that reads patient records to identify individuals at risk of undiagnosed illnesses, has raised $38 million in seed and Series A funding.
What Happened
The financing includes an $8 million seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, and a $30 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures. The company is not disclosing its valuation. Founded in South Africa in 2022 by siblings Jemima and Josiah Meyer, the startup initially offered a clinical nutrition tool built for dietitians before pivoting to a general-purpose platform designed to identify hospitalized patients suffering from conditions such as malnutrition or delirium that are often not detected early enough.
The platform plugs into hospital electronic health record systems and uses language models to extract information from written clinical notes. "A patient’s chart holds two kinds of data. Labs, weights, and vital signs sit in structured fields, but the most telling signs sit in clinicians’ written notes: poor appetite, recent weight loss, muscle loss, trouble swallowing. Our developing approach is extracting affirmative or negated mentions of these clinical concepts in an easily extensible and scalable way," CEO and co-founder Josiah Meyer said. This analysis is combined with structured data like lab reports and vitals to feed risk models that surface patients needing closer review. The company notes that its software does not diagnose patients, but rather highlights items for additional clinical evaluation.
Why It Matters
The SI system is currently deployed in more than 50 hospitals, screening for malnutrition and delirium, with programs for aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers, and congestive heart failure readmission risk undergoing further clinical validation. Customers include major health systems such as Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist, and Emory Healthcare. According to Meyer, the company has grown from three hospital partners to over 50 in the past year, with revenue increasing more than 10x during that period.
Malnutrition serves as a critical focus for the platform, as research suggests 20% to 50% of hospital inpatients are malnourished. Studies have linked the condition with longer stays, impaired wound healing, infections, and other complications, as well as higher morbidity and mortality. Healthleap employs an outcome-based pricing model, where contracts are priced by licensed bed count and tied to measurable ROI. "We use the hard ROI that the hospital finance team validates and attributes to us as the measurable ROI. Based on that, we contractually ensure that we deliver multiples of the contract price. To date, every customer has seen a 5x hard ROI or more, in some cases over 20x annual total ROI," Meyer said. For example, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, the company reports its malnutrition program resulted in $23.8 million in annualized financial impact, comprising $6.3 million from additional reimbursement and $17.5 million from shorter hospital stays.
The Bottom Line
Healthleap plans to use the new capital for engineering, product, sales, and customer success as it expands support for identifying more than 40 major health conditions and moves into outpatient and home care markets.