The results are in.
D.C.’s Rose Health has emerged victorious in our 2022 Inno Madness competition.
About the competition
The final round featured two local health care startups, both Halcyon accelerator companies — and both putting up a good fight.
Rose Health, founder Kavi Misri’s mental health platform that helps doctors bring mental health care to patients, took the title with 51.5% of the vote — just edging out Arlington’s OxiWear, Shavini Fernando’s medical device startup that develops a blood-oxygen-level monitor, which claimed 48.5% of the vote.
The final tallies differ from the votes shown in the online survey. We have removed duplicate and irregular votes, and recalculated the totals, due to some voting irregularities.
We appreciate each of the 32 companies that participated in this year’s bracket challenge. And we thank you, our readers, for weighing in every step of the way.
Want to relive the excitement? Here are Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4 and Round 5.
About the winner
Rose, one of our 2021 Startups to Watch that launched at the end of 2019 just before the Covid-19 pandemic, helps doctors identify mental health symptoms and get their patients necessary care.
The company is raising a $7.5 million Series A round for hiring, research and product development, and a geographic expansion, Misri told us earlier this year. That would follow $2.7 million in lifetime funding up to this point.
The business keeps its foot on the accelerator as the mental health sector sees continued demand, alongside other companies working to meet it in different ways. “We’re seeing significant momentum given the shift to value-based care and how the current mental health crisis has stressed the system,” Misri told us previously.
Misri, also one of the Washington Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 honorees, has taken the company through the Halcyon incubator in Georgetown, Johns Hopkins University’s Social Innovation Lab and Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Hexcite medical software accelerator. Rose is an acronym for “recognition of speech and emotion.”
