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

Healthleap, a startup building an AI platform that reads patient records to identify patients at risk of undiagnosed illnesses, has raised $38 million in seed and Series A funding, TechCrunch reported.

The financing comprises an $8 million seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, and a $30 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures. The company is not disclosing its valuation.

Founded in South Africa in 2022 by siblings Jemima and Josiah Meyer, Healthleap initially offered a clinical nutrition tool Jemima built for dietitians before pivoting to a more general-purpose platform. CEO and co-founder Josiah Meyer said the platform aims to identify hospital patients who may be suffering from conditions like malnutrition or delirium that are not often identified early enough.

According to Josiah, the company's developing approach extracts affirmative or negated mentions of clinical concepts from clinicians' written notes in an easily extensible and scalable way, feeding that analysis into risk models alongside structured data such as lab reports and vitals. Healthleap lets language models pull information from notes, including references to recent weight loss or difficulty swallowing, after plugging into a hospital's electronic health record system. The company notes its software does not diagnose patients, only highlights items for additional review.

Josiah said each night the platform analyzes every adult inpatient's record, including lab results, vital signs, weights, medications, diet orders, diagnoses and clinicians' notes, and each morning writes a risk score into the care team's existing workflow with a dashboard holding additional information about patients' trends.

Healthleap's platform is deployed in more than 50 hospitals, up from three hospital partners over the past year, where it screens patients for conditions such as malnutrition and delirium. Customers include Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist and Emory Healthcare. Programs to identify aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers and risk of readmission for congestive heart failure are undergoing further clinical validation.

Revenue has grown more than 10x over the same period, Josiah said, without disclosing specifics. The startup sells three-year contracts priced according to a hospital's licensed bed count and also uses an outcome-based pricing model. Josiah said every customer has seen a 5x hard ROI or more, in some cases over 20x annual total ROI.

At the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Healthleap says its malnutrition program resulted in $23.8 million in annualized financial impact, of which $6.3 million came from additional reimbursement and $17.5 million from shorter hospital stays.

Healthleap plans to spend the funding on engineering, product, sales and customer success as it adds support for identifying more conditions. Meyer said the company ultimately wants to cover more than 40 major health conditions and expand into outpatient and home care.