Healthcare Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in Los Angeles 2024

Akido is a care delivery platform focused on overcoming the complex needs of our most vulnerable populations. We are on a mission to leverage modern technology and proprietary datasets that have historically been locked up in our public health ecosystems in order to radically improve the quality of life and affordability of care for underserved people. We are a fast-growing, impact-focused, Y Combinator company being used nationwide to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, homelessness, and other public health crises. Across the country, health systems and government service providers use Akido to launch new technology-powered public health initiatives that improve the health and well-being of the communities they serve.

About 50% of all out-of-pocket payments get never collected in U.S. healthcare. Collectly helps medical groups and practices accelerate and increase patient cash flow, decrease costs to collect, and increase patient satisfaction.

Oncobox believes that many late-stage cancer patients are dying prematurely because doctors lack a data-driven tool to help them decide which drugs currently on the market would most effectively fight individual patients’ specific cancers. That’s where Oncobox comes in. Oncobox is low-cost personalized genetic profiling to help doctors decide which drug to use. In a recent study conducted by leading cancer researchers in Europe and Asia on 900 patients with various late-stage cancers, Oncobox increased the effectiveness of targeted therapies from 25% to 64%. How does Oncobox work? Over 150 targeted cancer drugs are currently on the market. But deciding which of these drugs to give to late-stage cancer patients is not a simple task. Cancer doctors are in a race against the clock. They don’t always know which medication will be most effective for their patients. Because these drugs are expensive and typically have significant side effects, they can’t just try them all. Because of these barriers, targeted cancer therapies are effective only 25% of the time, and 70% of patients with late-stage cancers die due to the toxic side effects of ineffective drugs. Oncobox Dx analyses tumor DNA, RNA, and molecular pathways using algorithms to distinguish which molecular targets are the most crucial for individual cases. Doctors receive a clinically actionable report that shows them which drugs are likely to be most effective on the patient. We actively seek partners from pharma, hospitals/clinicians, payers, and genomic centers. Feel free to contact us at hello@oncobox.com. Our team and the scientific advisory board consisting of leading scientists and researchers from UCLA, Stanford, Johns Hopkins University, Boston University, Tufts University, and Rutgers University.

AesculaTech believes in building better lives through smart chemistry. We design custom smart materials for a range of biomedical, commercial, and industrial applications. Our platform technology, AesculaGel offers adaptive response to a wide range of stimuli and can be tailor-made for biocompatibility, material strength, and a range of other attributes. Founded by one of MIT's 35 under 35 Innovators, AesculaTech is the shared vision of scientists, engineers, and medical experts. Our cornerstone product, Humidifeye, is an ophthalmic platform to treat dry eye disease. Dry eye affects more than 25 million Americans and the global treatment market is projected higher than $6 Billion within the next decade. Our thermally responsive, form-fitting materials are suitable for sustained yet reversible occlusion across a range of treatment times. In contrast to existing technologies, our product will not extrude, or cause discomfort as it adapts to patients. Though Humidifeye is not yet FDA approved, expect to hear about it soon! In coordination with partners across several sectors, we have a variety of groundbreaking technologies in the works that live up to our vision. This work has already been recognized. AesculaTech was named a Rosenman Innovator, received a National Science Foundation I-Corps grant, was a finalist in the 2019 Octane High Tech Awards, and is a graduate of both the Y Combinator and TMCx accelerator programs. In short, Y-Combinator was only the beginning.

Vena Vitals makes a small sticker that monitors blood pressure continuously. We've shown that it works in the operating room and is as accurate as the best tools doctors have today, at a fraction of the cost. We're a team of health tech scientists with multiple past startups and exits, and we've built products that have scaled to over 2M users.

Axle Health provides scheduling and workforce management software for home healthcare providers. The Axle platform includes a mobile app for clinicians, an operations dashboard for office teams, proprietary logistics algorithms to optimize scheduling, and a patient engagement and booking solution. Axle is integrated with a wide range of EMRs, and the entire Axle product can be customized and accessed modularly via API. Some of the biggest home health care providers in the country use Axle’s software to improve the utilization of their clinical teams, and automate the operational burden of scheduling and dispatching.

In a nutshell: many diseases are caused by how much your cells squeeze (asthma, fibrosis, others). We discover drugs that control how much cells squeeze, with ease, to treat disease. We use patented bioMEMS technology to turn cell strength (cells' ability to pull/ squeeze) into a quantifiable metric in drug discovery, to help find better drugs for mechanical diseases. We screen 100,000s of drugs against numerous contractile human cell types to comprehensively map human mechanobiology (the "contractome") and identify promising drug development starting points to deliver novel medicines to treat mechanically-driven diseases including asthma, hypertension, preterm labor, fibrosis, and others.

At Serif Health, we are taking the complexity out of the cost of healthcare. Our mission is to make healthcare pricing and contracting more transparent, easier to understand, fairer, and ultimately more affordable for all. New price transparency regulations have made a wealth of healthcare pricing and reimbursement data publicly available for the first time, but it is still extremely hard to ingest, organize, and actually use this data to understand the cost of care. That’s where we come in. Serif Health is building healthcare price intelligence data products and APIs to power the future of more transparent healthcare. We are an early-stage, venture-backed startup with a small, collaborative team of healthcare experts, engineers, and designers. We are excited to add new team members motivated by our mission, passionate about making a difference in healthcare, and looking forward to learning and growing from the challenges we will face along the way!

Parallel Bio created a human 'immune system in a dish' to discover drugs and immunotherapies more likely to work in patients. Our platform has all of the same elements as a human immune system, meaning you can test drugs and vaccines as if you were testing them in actual patients from the start. The biggest reason why 95% of new drugs fail is that they were tested in mice - but with our human platform, pharma companies will know which drugs will successfully treat patients, speeding up the process and reducing the cost. To date our platform has successfully been used to test 12 drugs, and vaccines against 8 different diseases. The company is founded by Robert DiFazio, a former Stanford R&D director with a PhD in immunology, and Juliana Hilliard, a former System1 Biosciences R&D lead with an MSc in bioengineering, both of whom have led drug discovery programs for years.

Chronic pelvic pain is a debilitating condition, that impacts over 15 million US women and costs over $39 Billion each year to manage. V-Flow medical has developed a trio of products that target the root cause of chronic pelvic pain, allowing millions of women to avoid opioid use and restart living a normal, pain free life. The V-Flow team has successfully scaled, multiple start-up medical device companies in various clinical disciplines with a combined exit value of over $4B. We have developed a broad IP portfolio covering both device design and method of application. A recent landscaping identified no competing IP for our indication of use. We have tested our beta prototypes and are initiating animal models ahead of a planned first in human investigation in Q1 2023. Following discussion with the NIH program advisors, we have been encouraged to apply for a phase 1 grant, call to action for the Heal initiative to find new diagnostic and non-drug treatments for chronic pelvic pain.

Makani Science is a medical device company based in Irvine, California. We have created the world's first wireless patch that can accurately and continuously monitor breathing. The company is co-founded by Dr. Michelle Khine and Dr. Michael Chu, two experts in the wearable monitoring space from the University of California, Irvine. The Makani Science system will collect unique breathing waveforms from patients in everyday environments to create the first large database of respiratory patterns associated with different diseases. Data will be collected through systems sold to our initial beachhead market, where we will help improve monitoring safety in patients being sedated for medical procedures. Our long-term goal is to combine machine learning with this database to identify and predict respiratory complications for different patient populations. We have a highly experienced team and will be FDA cleared in our beachhead market within a year.

Flowly’s mobile app is the VR version of Calm with a focus on reducing chronic pain for 100 million Americans. Flowly subscribers receive a $5 VR headset and Heart Rate sensor that collects a user's biometric data like HR and HRV, and converts it to visualizations in virtual experiences that reduce pain by 46%. Flowly is backed by the National Institutes of Health.

Ruth Health treats the 83% of post-pregnancy womxn who pee in their pants. We deliver 30-minute Postpartum Recovery + Training Sessions via telehealth, so moms around the globe with pelvic floor prolapse can get back to work, sex, and normal life—5x faster. Using conversational AI + biometric readings, Ruth Health will accumulate the largest, most diverse database in America on longitudinal maternal health

Float brings a nurse to your home when you’re sick. If you have a chronic illness, instead of making you come to an overcrowded hospital full of sick people, we bring the best of the hospital to you.

Helping pregnant parents save the most personal source of stem cells - from their umbilical cord and placenta - to unlock future disease treatments. Offering cord blood banking, cord tissue banking, and placenta stem cell banking.

Almond is like One Medical but for women’s health: we make it easy to get great ObGyn care fast, both at our in-person offices and over telehealth. The problem with traditional ObGyn practices is that physician time is misused, so patients get slow care. We're rebuilding back-office tech that saves physicians time, and we're hiring a wider range of care providers roles, which let us deliver better outcomes to patients and reduce the amount of time it takes to get their issue resolved.

Scanwell Health makes healthcare more accessible through smartphone-enabled, at-home diagnostics. Scanwell's innovative approach lets people test from anywhere, skip the waiting room and get same-day results. By quickly diagnosing acute illnesses, chronic diseases and rare conditions, Scanwell accelerates the path to treatment. Our first product is the only FDA-cleared over-the-counter app that provides testing and treatment for urinary tract infections (UTIs).