Industry publication HealthInvestor has published a round-up of specific trends in HealthTech from leading professionals: Molly Gilmartin from Albion VC, Paul Tomasic from Houlihan Lokey, Dr Michelle Tempest from Candesic, Lloyd Price a healthtech M&A advisor, and Neil Mitchell from M&A advisors Rickett Mitchell.
A look back on 2023: Funding was down, but not as far down as in European tech as a whole. Highs to note were the nine figures raised from TechBio Apollo Therapeutics, which raised the sector’s biggest of the year with $227m, and MedTech robotics companies CMR Surgical and DistalMotion. (Source: Sifted & The Economist).
Overall, HealthTechs in the TechBio space in 2023 raised similar figures to the previous year, and medtech funding remained well above any previous year to 2021.
The biggest HealthTech story of 2023 was of course Babylon. Babylon’s Ali Parsa saw his scaleup go bust over the summer, less than two years after a botched special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) flotation that left the company with a $300m cash shortfall. Babylon abruptly exited its US business when a rescue merger fell through in August and was left scrambling to sell what was left of its UK business. The pieces of the business Babylon did manage to offload brought in less than $7m — just 0.17% of the $4.2bn Babylon was once worth. (Source: The Economist, The Times Finance, Sifted).
Now we look to 2024 – our round up: In 2024, the HealthTech landscape will evolve dramatically, focusing more on bridging accessibility gaps in diagnostic testing and enhancing patient care.
Wearable devices and smartwatches will continue to move beyond monitoring and add more screening features to warn us of health issues before they become bigger problems. The functionality of these devices will continue to transition from passive to proactive.
This coming year will focus on the importance of having the infrastructure in place to study AI products and generate the evidence needed to show that they are safe and effective for use.
Throughout 2024, we expect to see an uptick in the volume and value of healthcare M&A across the VC-backed ecosystem, thus acquiring customers, geographical access and products or features in a capital-efficient manner.
This round-up was written by our Marketing team with input from sources: The Times, The Economist, Sifted and the Financial Times, and Yahoo Finance. The link above takes you to the HealthInvestor article in full.