Healthleap raises $38M for its AI that flags hospital patients who may need a closer look

Healthleap, a South African startup founded in 2022 by siblings Jemima and Josiah Meyer, has successfully secured $38 million in seed and Series A funding for its AI platform designed to detect at-risk patients in hospitals. The recent financing, co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, along with a $30 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures, brings the total investment into the company to a undisclosed valuation.

Initially offering a clinical nutrition tool for dietitians, the company later pivoted to develop a more general-purpose platform that aims to identify hospital patients suffering from conditions like malnutrition or delirium. These conditions often go undiagnosed early enough, potentially impacting patient recovery and increasing healthcare costs.

Healthleap's platform is currently deployed in over 50 hospitals, where it screens patients for malnutrition, delirium, aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers, and risk of readmission for congestive heart failure. The startup extracts both structured data from lab reports and vital signs, as well as unstructured data from clinicians' written notes, using language models to identify clinical concepts such as poor appetite, recent weight loss, and muscle loss.

The company's approach involves analyzing every adult inpatient's record each night, generating a risk score that is then integrated into the care team's existing workflow the following morning. This risk score is accessible via a dashboard, providing additional information about patients' trends. Healthleap highlights these potential issues for further review, but does not make any diagnoses.

Malnutrition has been a useful starting point for Healthleap, as it is a condition that often goes undiagnosed and can adversely affect patient recovery. Research suggests that 20% to 50% of hospital inpatients are malnourished, and some studies have linked malnutrition with longer hospital stays, impaired wound healing, infections, and higher morbidity and mortality rates.

Over the past year, Healthleap has grown from three hospital partners to more than 50, with notable customers including Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist, and Emory Healthcare. The startup's revenue has grown more than tenfold over the same period, though specific figures were not disclosed. Healthleap offers three-year contracts priced according to a hospital's licensed bed count, as well as an outcome-based pricing model.

The company's revenue growth has been attributed to the hard ROI that hospitals validate and attribute to Healthleap. To date, every customer has seen a 5x or more hard ROI, with some exceeding 20x annual total ROI. For instance, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Healthleap's malnutrition program resulted in an estimated $23.8 million in annualized financial impact, including $6.3 million from additional reimbursement and $17.5 million from shorter hospital stays.

With the new funding, Healthleap plans to invest in engineering, product development, sales, and customer success to expand its capabilities in identifying more health conditions, ultimately aiming to cover more than 40 major health conditions and expand into outpatient and home care settings.