The Prosper HealthTech Accelerator spring cohort has kicked off with five startups joining the program.
Prosper, a coalition of community, civic and business leaders committed to creating a more vibrant and racially inclusive economy, plans for the accelerator to connect cutting-edge health technology startups to the coaching, capital and networking they need to build and grow their businesses.
The Accelerator is launching in partnership with Gener8tor, a nationally ranked startup accelerator company. The accelerator will invest in startups selected for the program through a fund managed by Redhawk Advisory. The accelerator will run for 12 weeks twice a year and offers support, mentorship, resources and lessons as well as a $60,000 cash-for-equity investment into each startup. The goal is that at least two to three companies out of each cohort will remain in Birmingham.
The companies include:
• Oben Health (San Francisco): Founder and CEO is Peter Njongwe. The company is a culturally competent digital health treatment with a goal of safely and sustainably reverses heart disease without medication or surgery. The treatment is based on the clinical work of Chief Medical Officer Michelle Routhenstien. She helps patients lower or normalize their blood pressure starting with hypertension and 70% achieve medication reductions in three months.
• HealthOpX (West Bloomfield, Michigan): Founder and CEO is Wesley Ma. It is a software platform that partners community-based organizations and home care agencies with health insurers, providers and government entities to engage and improve the health of at-risk patients.
• TruDiary (Sneilville, Georgia): Founder and CEO is Veronica Berry. TruDiary provides culturally relevant value-based care to Black and Brown maternal patients in underserved communities. TruDiary’s digital health platform's goal is to eliminate barriers to quality prenatal care by connecting patients to the right doctor, offering inclusive educational content and evaluating social determinants of health services such as food security, mental health, lactation services and transportation to patients.
• Kaya (San Francisco): Founder and CEO is Corey Anand. Kaya offers virtual mental health groups that connect employees from different companies together based on shared experiences. Their groups are led by experienced licensed clinicians.
• Peak Mind (Plainfield, Indiana): Founder and CEO is Alicia McKoy. The company’s mental well-being platform aims to address the problem of work-related stress, related chronic disease, work-related injury and employee disengagement. Peak Mind uses artificial emotional intelligence and machine learning to analyze particular personalities and work environments that affect the stress levels of workers, and it also studies how they can be influenced by well-being nudges and action steps.
