Somewhere in every big hospital's records are patients with a problem nobody has written down yet. Healthleap, a start-up built by two siblings from Bloemfontein, sells software that goes looking for them, and last week it raised US$38 million, roughly R630 million, to look for more.
The looking happens overnight. Josiah Meyer, the chief executive, told TechCrunch that each night the software analyses every adult inpatient's record, from lab results and vital signs to weights, medications and clinicians' notes. Anyone who looks at risk of a condition that tends to slip past gets flagged, and a clinician takes it from there. The software does not diagnose anybody, the company says; it only points at things worth reviewing.
It began with malnutrition, which costs the US health system up to US$58 billion a year, and has since added delirium. For a hospital the pay-off is partly care and partly money, because a condition that gets recorded and treated is one the hospital can be reimbursed for. Sequoia partner Alfred Lin said one hospital identified and treated 39% more malnutrition cases, and one health system brought in US$11 million in extra revenue.
From a dietitian's tool to 50 hospitals
The first version was built for one ward job. Jemima Meyer, a registered clinical dietitian, built a clinical nutrition tool for dietitians, and it became the company's first product. Her brother Josiah, who studied statistics and machine learning at the University of the Free State, runs the company. The pair went to Jim Fouché High School and Kovsies before moving to California in 2022, and Healthleap is now based in San Francisco.
It has spread quickly since. The software is in more than 50 hospitals, up from three a year ago, Josiah told TechCrunch, and the customer list includes Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai and Houston Methodist.
Two rounds and a nod from Roelof Botha
The US$38 million is two funding rounds counted together. The US$8 million seed round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, and a US$30 million Series A was led by Hummingbird Ventures. Healthleap is not disclosing what that makes it worth. Roelof Botha, the South African who used to run Sequoia, said in a public post that he took "particular pride" in the Meyers' journey.
The money is meant to widen the search. Josiah told Fierce Healthcare the plan is to go "beyond malnutrition to more than 40 conditions", starting with delirium, aspiration pneumonia and pressure injuries. So far, every result anyone has put a number on is a malnutrition result.
