Duncan Cock Foster

Big things happened in the Techstars network in January: →  8 portfolio companies secured funding →  2 portfolio companies were acquired →  2 portfolio companies combined →  1 new global network partner ➕ U.S.-based rare earths processing startup Phoenix Tailings (Techstars 2020) closes $43M Series B funding round. ➕ Tive (Techstars 2017), a startup developing tech to pinpoint freight shipments in real time, raises $40M Series C. ➕ The Helper Bees (Techstars 2016) raises $35M Series C for home care. ➕ First Ascent Biomedical (Techstars 2021), a personalized oncology drug prediction platform, gets $6M to accelerate lab openings. ➕ Crypto tech startup Dfns (Techstars 2021) raises $16M to increase its workforce and expand in the Middle East. ➕ AI-powered mass tort company Parambil (formerly MedThread; Techstars 2023) announces $2M in pre-seed funding. ➕ Accenture Ventures invests in QuSecure (Techstars 2021) to advance PQC solutions for government and business. ➕ Vessl Prosthetics Inc. Prosthetics (Techstars 2023) secures a pre-seed round to drive innovation in prosthetic solutions. ⭐ Infinite Reality will acquire virtual shopping platform Obsess (Techstars 2017). ⭐ Hook Security acquires Haekka (Techstars 2021), a Slack-first training platform. ⭐ Transmute (Techstars 2018) and mesur.io (Techstars 2018) announce a strategic combination to remove disruption from global supply chains. https://lnkd.in/gn5wJZur 

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Very excited to announce our investment in Charta Health today! At Madrona, we believe the most impactful AI companies don’t just speed up existing workflows — they reimagine them from first principles. Charta Health is building an AI-native platform that transforms chart review from a labor-intensive, error-prone process into a real-time intelligence layer — improving care quality, billing accuracy, and provider efficiency. Karan Mehandru and I have had the pleasure of getting to know founders Justin Liu, Scott Morris over the last couple of years and we’re thrilled to be partnering with them and the entire Charta team — alongside Bain Capital Ventures, SV Angel, Refract Ventures, and South Park Commons! More on why we invested below! 👇 https://lnkd.in/druSN-Na

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What's been happening in mental health? ⏺ Vitalic Health raised a $4M seed round for its geriatric behavioural health care platform. ⏺ Kooth Digital Health landed a $1.45 million pilot contract to provide their Soluna platform to over 50,000 students across New Jersey. ⏺ Peer support startup Fello , led by former Uber Eats executive Alyssa Pollack, raised $10.4M for virtual, app-based peer support designed to combat the loneliness epidemic. ⏺ Oceans Healthcare acquired Haven Behavioral Healthcare , expanding to 5 new U.S. states and adding 7 new locations. ⏺ Mabel raised a €600K pre-seed round to help improve women's mental health through microdosing programs and mushroom-based supplements ⏺ Wysa published a paper on the impact of their early stage digital mental health interventions for Singaporeans. ⏺ Applications for the KHP Ventures Mental Health immersion programme close tomorrow (Jan 7th) (All links below) __ If you liked this and want insights on the mental health industry in your inbox every week, subscribe to The Hemingway Report newsletter and follow me Steve Duke 📩 #MentalHealth #BehavioralHealth

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Who’s really building the next generation of $1B+ healthcare companies? At SignalFire, we’ve always believed that founder DNA is the strongest signal of future outcomes. In Health & PharmaTech, where complexity, regulation, and distribution hurdles are the norm, that’s especially true. We turned to Beacon, our proprietary data engine tracking 650M+ professionals, to analyze 300+ HealthTech unicorn founders across the country. Here’s what the data showed: - 70% had 10+ years of experience. Execution and trust matter more than hype here - Nearly half came from outside healthcare, bringing fresh playbooks into a legacy industry - 80% had co-founders. HealthTech usually isn’t a solo game - San Francisco had 5x more unicorn founders than Boston, suggesting the center of gravity for HealthTech is shifting west - And the most scalable companies were led by so-called "Centaur Teams" combining GenAI talent with experienced GTM leaders We’re in the early innings of a historic transformation. With healthcare finally digitized and AI infrastructure in place, we’re seeing the rise of a new wave of #HealthTech unicorns that are faster, leaner, and more multidisciplinary than ever before. In this new report (in partnership with Fierce Healthcare), we break down: 📍 Which U.S. cities have become the new HealthTech hubs 📍 What the new HealthTech founder archetype looks like 📍 Why M&A has overtaken IPOs in this sector 📍 How Centaur Teams are scaling startups into decacorns If you’re an investor, operator, or founder in this space, this is your field guide to what’s next. (Link to full report in comments.)

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