Healthleap raises $38M to flag at-risk hospital patients with AI

Healthleap, a startup building an AI platform that reads patient records to flag people at risk of undiagnosed illnesses, has raised $38 million in seed and Series A funding, TechCrunch has learned: an $8 million seed co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, and a $30 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures. The company isn’t disclosing its valuation.

Healthleap was founded in South Africa in 2022 by siblings Jemima and Josiah Meyer. It initially offered a clinical nutrition tool Jemima had built for dietitians, but the company later pivoted to a more general-purpose platform aimed at catching hospital patients who may be suffering from conditions — like malnutrition or delirium — that often go undiagnosed, CEO and co-founder Josiah Meyer told TechCrunch. “A patient’s chart holds two kinds of data,” he said. “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.”

The platform is now deployed in more than 50 hospitals, where it screens for malnutrition and delirium, Josiah said. Healthleap has also built programs to identify aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers, and readmission risk for congestive heart failure, though those are still undergoing further clinical validation.

To find at-risk or undiagnosed patients, Healthleap plugs into a hospital’s electronic health record system and uses language models to pull details out of clinicians’ notes, feeding that alongside structured data like lab reports and vitals into its risk models. The software doesn’t diagnose patients, the company says — it only flags cases for additional review. Each night the system analyzes every adult inpatient’s record, and each morning it writes a risk score into the care team’s workflow, alongside a dashboard with more detail on patient trends.

Malnutrition was likely a useful starting point: research suggests 20% to 50% of hospital inpatients are malnourished, and studies link it to longer stays, impaired wound healing, infections, and higher complication and mortality rates. Healthleap has grown from three hospital partners to more than 50 over the past year, with customers now including Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist, and Emory Healthcare, and revenue has grown more than 10x over that period, Josiah said, though he didn’t share specific figures.

The startup sells three-year contracts priced by a hospital’s licensed bed count, plus an outcome-based layer: Healthleap contractually guarantees a multiple of the contract price based on the hard, hospital-validated ROI it delivers, and Josiah said every customer to date has seen at least a 5x hard ROI, with some seeing more than 20x in total annual ROI. At the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Healthleap says its malnutrition program alone produced $23.8 million in annualized financial impact — $6.3 million from additional reimbursement, $17.5 million from shorter stays.

Healthleap plans to spend the new funding on engineering, product, sales, and customer success as it adds support for more conditions. The company ultimately wants to cover more than 40 major health conditions and expand into outpatient and home care, Josiah said.

Why it matters

Malnutrition alone affects an estimated 20%-50% of hospital inpatients and is linked to worse outcomes and higher costs; Healthleap’s bet is that catching it — and similar under-diagnosed conditions — early can pay for itself many times over, which is why its pricing is tied directly to the hard ROI hospitals can verify.