With health care and innovation at the forefront amid a global pandemic, Health Wildcatters is looking to help develop and nurture a new set of startups.
The Dallas seed accelerator has announced nine new startups that will make up its eighth cohort since it was founded in 2013. While Health Wildcatters cohort members typically come Texas, a pivot to a virtual model has allowed the accelerator to bring in companies from around the world.
“This year’s nine new portfolio companies were selected from a record-breaking pool of applicants, increasing the geographical diversity of our portfolio,” said Hubert Zajicek, CEO of Health Wildcatters said in a prepared statement.
In addition to mentoring and access to potential investors, Health Wildcatters’ 12-week program comes with its own financial investments in the cohort. By joining the accelerator, the companies are offered $30,000 in exchange for 8 percent equity, along with follow-on opportunities that could reach a total of $380,000.
Through its previous cohorts, Health Wildcatters has invested more than $100 million collectively in the more than 70 companies in its portfolio. Among those are Dallas patient caregiver support platform Cariloop, which raised a $6 million Series A led by Dallas family office Patterson Thoma in May, and biotech startup Lantern Pharma, which raised more than $26 million in its June IPO.
While health care and biotech startups have seen large funding rounds during the pandemic, the crisis is also having an effect on the operations of Health Wildcatters’ upcoming accelerator program. This round, the majority of the program will be offered remotely, which Zajicek said allowed the accelerator to expand its geographical reach, selecting startups and mentors from a pool that spans three countries and 28 states. He added that the virtual format has the potential to provide more access to other remote opportunities such as pitch competitions.
“We’re discovering in real-time or near real-time the challenges that there are and what the opportunities are,” Zajicek told NTX Inno. “We don’t have the big parties; you can’t rub elbows with 15 investors at the same time. And so that would be a little on the minus column for some to say, ‘Well, am I still getting the experience, am I still getting the value?’ That’s turning into actually our reach, out time efficiency and our ability to bring speakers in from all over … is actually very much offsetting that perceived negative potential.”
Check out the new cohort and descriptions provided by Health Wildcatters:
- ColonAI (New York) - ColonAI is a software company that uses artificial intelligence to help gastroenterologists, physicians who specialize in diseases of the digestive system, efficiently screen, detect and treat tumors during colonoscopy.
- Digital Health Immunity (Plano) - Digital Immunity is developing advanced technologies to help companies safely navigate the pandemic, as well as reduce the impact of many other infectious diseases.
- EchoScope (Boston) - EchoScope is a wearable bladder analytics for prostatectomy patients.
- FirstlookAI (San Francisco) - FirstlookAI’s vision is to reduce hospital costs and increase labor efficiency by implementing a clinical decision support system (CDSS platform) driven by a methodology in artificial intelligence known as associative memory classifiers (AMC) to optimize healthcare scheduling, thus improving patient outcomes.
- Iluria Health (Israel) - Iluria aims to revolutionize the existing trial and error based treatment monitoring currently administered to ADHD patients by offering a comprehensive SaaS based solution which provides continuous, objective and passive monitoring, using biomarker data (smart wearable agnostic) and ML analysis.
- Karyosoft (Indiana) - Karyosoft’s genomics intelligence data management platform revolutionizes life sciences research by empowering biologists to quickly transform and democratize vast amounts of genomics data into meaningful insights and discovery.
- LoopDX (Barcelona) - LoopDX specializes in developing cost-effective, accurate and timely methodologies for medical-related problems that the global healthcare systems face every day. The focus of LoopDX is to support the diagnosis of Sepsis, aiming to make the diagnosis easier for health care workers to understand and treat patients before the occurrence of further medical-related issues.
- Reopia Optics (Danville, Ca.) - Preventing the global myopia epidemic with unique patented optics.
Spectrum Disinfection (Denver) - Spectrum’s breakthrough technology powers a new class of consumer and commercial disinfectant - more powerful than Clorox bleach but safer for the environment.
