CB Insightㅣ 2024-12-04
For health system CIOs, digital health investors, and life sciences executives, this list spotlights companies to explore for technology adoption, investment opportunities, and strategic partnerships as healthcare shifts toward AI-driven infrastructure, advanced diagnostics, and specialized care platforms.
Four key themes emerged from this year’s cohort:
- AI will become foundational to infrastructure across healthcare, as evidenced by 36 of the 50 companies building AI products, from insurance claim copilots (Alaffia Health) to specialized healthcare LLMs (Hippocratic AI). These startups reflect the start of a broader shift for AI from powering point solutions to becoming an essential part of healthcare delivery for patients.
- Diagnostic innovations continue to dominate, representing the most crowded category on last year’s list and tying for the largest category this year, with 11 companies developing tools across imaging (Airs Medical), pathology (Proscia), and non-invasive diagnostics (Alimetry). These next-generation diagnostics look to make testing more accessible and non-invasive while prioritizing early detection.
- Virtual and hybrid care companies more than doubled in this year’s cohort, with 11 companies in this category, up from 5 last year. The increase reflects the growing number of specialized platforms in areas including mental health (Talkiatry) and cancer care (Resilience), signaling the shift from general telemedicine toward condition-specific virtual care models.
- Workflow efficiency emerges as a key priority heading into 2025, with 19 companies streamlining administrative and clinical tasks, from medical document processing (Tennr) to ambient documentation (Abridge). The surge of automation solutions here signals that healthcare organizations will prioritize efficiency amid staffing shortages to help shift provider time from paperwork to patient care.
Our selection of winning companies followed a rigorous three-step process.
From a pool of 10,000+ digital health startups, we analyzed companies using CB Insights’ proprietary metrics — Commercial Maturity and Mosaic scores — along with additional data on partnerships, funding, patents, leadership, and headcount.
Companies with high Mosaic scores (> 500) and recent market activity advanced to our shortlist of 1,500 candidates. We supplemented this analysis with direct company submissions via Analyst Briefings.
Our analysts then evaluated strategic partnerships, market adoption, and growth metrics to identify the 50 most promising digital health companies.