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 has exclusively learned. The financing includes 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 (pictured above), the startup initially offered a clinical nutrition tool Jemima had built for dietitians.
But the company later pivoted and built a more general-purpose platform that aims to identify patients admitted to hospitals who may be suffering from conditions like malnutrition or delirium that aren't often identified early enough, CEO and co-founder Josiah Meyer told TechCrunch. "A patient's chart holds two kinds of data. Labs, weights, and vital signs sit in structured fields, but the most telling signs sit in clinicians' written notes: poor appetite, recent weight loss, muscle loss, trouble swallowing.
Our developing approach is extracting affirmative or negated mentions of these clinical concepts in an easily extensible and scalable way," Josiah said. The company's platform is currently deployed in more than 50 hospitals, where it screens patients for conditions such as malnutrition and delirium, he said. The startup has also built programs to identify aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers, and risk of readmission for congestive heart failure, which Josiah said are undergoing further clinical validation.
To find patients that may be at risk of an illness or were undiagnosed, Healthleap plugs into a hospital's electronic health record system and uses language models to pull information from written notes, such as references to recent weight loss or difficulty swallowing. That analysis is then fed into its risk models, alongside structured information such as lab reports and vitals to surface patients who may need a closer look. The company notes that its software doesn't diagnose patients, only highlights items for additional review.