Healthcare AI Guy Weekly | 7/15

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Highlights if you’ve only got 2 minutes…

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AI leading the digital health surge

The first half of 2025 saw digital health startups raise $6.4B across 245 deals, steady funding, but what’s different this time is the breakout role of AI. AI-enabled companies captured 62% of all VC dollars, raised bigger rounds, and scored 9 of the 11 mega deals so far this year. IPOs from Hinge and Omada Health signaled new momentum, while tools like ambient AI scribes hit record adoption rates among providers. On the M&A front, digital health companies and private equity firms are stitching together AI-native platforms with legacy healthcare infrastructure. For example, New Mountain Capital combined revenue cycle firm Access Healthcare with SmarterDx and Thoughtful.ai to create “Smarter Technologies,” betting that pairing legacy distribution with cutting-edge AI will drive margin and scale. The proof is in: digital health’s AI era is already here, reshaping how care is funded, delivered, and scaled. (link)(linkedin)

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Pharma AI readiness report

The pharma industry is staring down a $236B revenue cliff from expiring patents. In response, the top 50 pharma companies are investing aggressively in AI to speed up drug discovery, cut costs, and future-proof their operations. To highlight these moves, CB Insights just released its 2025 Pharma AI Readiness Report, showing how top pharma companies are rapidly scaling AI across drug development, operations, and partnerships. Here are 3 key takeaways:

• AI is becoming core infrastructure: Pharma giants are investing billions in domestic AI-enabled facilities, turning manufacturing centers into testing grounds for large-scale automation and predictive tools.

• Partnerships are the new power move: Top companies are combining internal builds with aggressive external activity. Lilly leads in AI investments, while Roche and Bayer stand out for their extensive partnerships.

• Oncology is the top focus area: One in three pharma AI partnerships now targets cancer, with efforts spanning tumor profiling, diagnostics, and patient monitoring.

  (link)

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Google’s new health AI models

Google released two new models in its MedGemma suite of open medical AI tools, aimed at making high-quality care more accessible. The first, MedGemma 27B Multimodal, can interpret both medical images and patient records and runs on a single GPU. The second, MedSigLIP, is a compact image-text encoder for tasks like classification and search. Both models show strong performance: MedGemma 27B scored 87.7% on the MedQA benchmark and produced X-ray reports that matched radiologist quality 81% of the time. The tools are already being adapted by hospitals for uses like urgent X-ray review and translating traditional Chinese medical texts. By making these models open and efficient, Google is lowering the technical barrier to using AI in healthcare, especially for smaller clinics and resource-limited settings, and that we can get behind! (link)(tweet)

Tools & Partnerships 🔧

Latest on business, consumer, and clinical healthcare AI tools and partnerships…

TOOLS

• Isomorphic Labs preps AI-designed drugs for human trials: Google’s drug discovery arm, built on DeepMind’s AlphaFold, is set to begin clinical testing of its AI-developed oncology drugs. Backed by $600M and major pharma deals. (link)

• LLMs perform autonomous robotic surgery for the first time: Researchers introduced SRT-H, a hierarchical vision-language-action model that achieved 100% success across eight ex vivo gallbladder surgeries (cholecystectomy) without human help. (link)

• Saint Peter’s Hospital cuts ER visits 7% using AI: The NJ hospital used Lightbeam AI to predict patients at risk of avoidable ED visits. By targeting social needs like food and transport, they improved care and cut high-risk visits from 16.7% to 9.5%. (link)

• Mayo Clinic debuts AI to detect surgical-site infections via photo: The new Vision Transformer model helps outpatient care teams identify infections faster and more accurately using patient-submitted images. (link)

• Mount Sinai launches Sofiya, an agentic AI for cardiac pre-procedure calls: Developed in-house with clinicians, Sofiya handles patient instructions and questions before stenting procedures, saving 200+ nursing hours in 5 months with >95% patient satisfaction. (link)

• University of Iowa Health Care reports major impact from ambient AI: Since adopting Nabla’s AI note tool, clinicians saved 2.6 hours/week, burnout scores dropped >30%, and it’s now used in 220K encounters, about a 1/3 of total visits. (link)

• Mayo Clinic using 97 AI algorithms across its system, with 270 more in development: Current tools help with tasks like extracting outside records, generating visit notes, analyzing brain waves, and predicting treatment outcomes. Leaders aim to integrate AI into more routine workflows. (link)

• xAI unveils Grok 4 and 4 Heavy: The new models deliver #1 rankings on key benchmarks like Humanity’s Last Exam and Arc-AGI-2. Grok 4 is priced at $30/month, while the advanced Heavy tier costs $300/month. (link)

• FDA clears AI-powered wristband for essential tremor: Fasikl's Felix NeuroAI device uses real-time data to personalize neurostimulation therapy, aiming to reduce involuntary hand tremors without medication or surgery. (link)

• UCLA Health develops AI for ER note generation: The model turns structured hospital data into narrative notes to support emergency care and decision-making. (link)

• John Snow Labs launches Martlet.ai for risk coding: The new LLM platform is designed to improve risk adjustment and HCC coding accuracy for payers and providers. (link)

PARTNERSHIPS

• Navina + Nabla: Navina and Nabla are integrating their clinical copilot and ambient AI tools to streamline documentation and enhance decision-making at the point of care. (link)

• KPMG + Hippocratic AI: KPMG is teaming up with Hippocratic AI to deploy generative AI agents that reduce administrative burden and help address the healthcare workforce shortage. (link)

• Rush Health + Fabric: Rush launched Rush Connect and Rush Connect+, new virtual care platforms powered by Fabric’s 24/7 AI assistant, offering on-demand and subscription-based access to asynchronous urgent care nationwide. (link)

• Joint Commission + CHAI: The Joint Commission and Coalition for Health AI are partnering to co-develop AI best practices, playbooks, tools, and a certification program to promote responsible use of health AI. (link)

• Lunit + Microsoft: Lunit is partnering with Microsoft to co-develop customizable AI imaging models and use agentic AI to automate radiology workflows. (link)

Deal Desk 💸 

Spotlight on latest capital raises, M&A, and investments…

FUNDING

• Tandem Health, a Stockholm-based clinical documentation startup, raised $50M in Series A funding. Kinnevik led, with participation from Northzone, and Amino Collective. (link)

• Biorce, a Spanish provider of AI solutions for pharma clinical trials, raised $5.8M in funding. Norrsken VC led the round. (link)

• ScienceMachine, a London-based developer of AI for biotech research, raised $3.5m in pre-seed funding led by Revent and Nucleus Capital. (link)

• Solence, a Paris-based AI-driven health startup focused on treatments for Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, raised $1.87M in seed funding. (link)

Other Relevant News 🔍

News, podcasts, blogs, tweets, resources, etc…

• Voice agents are easy to use, hard to build (link)

• a16z: challenger startups gain ground on enablers in digital health (link)

• These 9 healthcare startups are prepping to IPO next (link)

• Voice AI in healthcare review and analysis (link)

• 15 clinical uses for AI — with results (link)

AI Job Opportunities 💼 

Contact us to feature roles in our newsletter…

• Chief of Staff at Neon Health, an AI-powered patient access platform

  $125 - $195K | SF (link)

• Applied AI Systems Engineer at Neon Health, an AI platform for patient access

  $140 - $200K | SF (link)

• Director of AI Transformation at Aledade, a VBC enablement platform for PCPs

  $NA | Remote (link)

• Research Scientist, Medical AI at Deepmind, Google’s AI research lab

  $NA | London (link)

• Director of PM (Healthcare AI) at Evolent, a specialty care mgmt platform 
  $130 - $160K | Remote (link)

Visuals of the Week 📸

Funny memes, cool pics, and interesting data from around the web…