A San Diego-based investment group has created a new $60 million fund to finance health care startups, including those with in-home and virtual care support systems.
Torrey Pines Investment, a specialty life-science investment company that invests in early development-stage assets, created the fund, TealTech Capital. The fund aims to finance startups in point-of-care diagnostics and treatment, novel organizational and financial models of care delivery, and artificial intelligence and deep learning health care support systems.
The emergence of the fund comes at a time when its investors are seeing a “critical mass of digital, new material and biomedical technology being developed,” Nikolay Savchuk, managing partner at Torrey Pines Investments, told Home Health Care News.
“We might have a real shot at making an evolutionary change in health care through the new wave of the technological revolution that I believe can and must be done with zero level of the political and regulatory nonsense,” Savchuk told HHCN.
The fund’s first investment is a platform for rapid clinical-level diagnostics enabling medical care to move from a physician’s office to the patient’s home, according to a press release. The startup, TealNet Mobile Medical Office (MMO), is also based in San Diego and developed the platform to enable physicians to perform diagnostics and analyses at a patient’s home within 10-20 minutes. The fund will invest up to $500,000 in the seed round in TealNet MMO, according to Savchuk.
“Health care is moving towards digitized personalized care which gives patients the convenient and accessible medical services where and when they need it,” Savchuk said in a press release. “The TealTech fund focuses on three main directions of fundamental shifts in health care: the medical technologies innovations, digital care and artificial intelligence tool.”
The in-home rapid testing is comparable in quality and volume to diagnostics performed in a regular hospital or an outpatient clinic in one to three days, according to a press release. The platform also has different price points for patients to choose the type of consultation for their needs and budgets.
“We believe that the future of health care lies in the accessibility and flexibility that digital care and point-of-care diagnostics and treatment provide, as well as in the precision and convenience that computer-assisted tools help deliver,” Savchuk said. “Thus, we created the fund to help advance innovative start-ups that bring convenient, digitalized, modern solutions to patients.”
Going forward, the fund will target investments in “various flavors of applications in health and wellness,” Savchuk told HHCN.
Torrey Pines and its partners will invest up to $60 million over the next five years, the press release states. For each investment opportunity, the fund is likely to invest in the range of $500,000 to $3 million, according to Savchuk.
Written by Amy Baxter
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