#89 🍩 $74M Genomics Boost, WHOOP worth US$10bn & IVF wearables
What is happening in health tech & innovation?
Hola amigos - happy Friday!
Hope we’re all surviving Q4, have recovered from any lingering chocolate & food hangovers, and are enjoying the lull before the healthech event chaos month that is May.
There’s a lot we have to cover today, so we’re not going to mess about today and just dive straight in…
🐣 TODAY’S ISSUE
Noteworthy
Funding
Newsworthy
AI Updates
Sick Science
Startup Stuff
Events
Cool Content
Noteworthy 🗞️
Funding
🧫 Symex Labs raised $2.5M to develop a wearable hormone sensor aiming to simplify IVF monitoring & at‑home fertility tracking
💡 4DMedical secured an unexpected $83M private placement from undisclosed institutional investors
📊 BlinkLab (ASX: BB1), a digital health company developing AI-powered diagnostic tech, secured $17.5m to Fund FDA Autism diagnostic clearance and advance ADHD trials
💉 xCystence Bio, a biotech developing novel targeted‑protein‑degrader therapies for Polycystic Kidney Disease, closed its pre-seed round with Uniseed, BioCurate, Monash Ventures & Breakthrough Victoria
👩🔬 Proseek Bio raised $1.5M seed round to advance OC‑Triage, its blood‑based ovarian cancer test
🧬 Genomics Health Futures Mission awarded up to $74M for projects advancing genomic research & innovation
Newsworthy
🩸 WHOOP & i-screen launch Australia’s first WHOOP-compatible blood test, enabling users to upload 30+ biomarker results directly into the app
“WHOOP Advanced Labs Blood Test - we provide the pdf report for you to upload your bloodwork results into WHOOP as part of an existing WHOOP membership.”
🌍 Australia is set to join Horizon Europe (EU’s EUR93.5B research & innovation program), giving Aussie unis access to the world’s largest R&D platform
🩺 Updoc is giving a rural NSW region free, unlimited access to GP telehealth through its Community Access Program
🤝 Anthropic signed an MoU with the Aussie Gov to collaborate on safe AI adoption, economic impact & workforce transformation
🧠 St Vincent’s Health Australia launched Medicare Mental Health Check In, a free digital mental support program for Aussies aged 16+
💰 Mindset Health were provisionally approved to participate in CMS ACCESS, an experimental Medicare program meant to expand access to technology-supported chronic care
💰 Snow Medical Research Foundation invested $24M in 3 Aus biomedical researchers through its 2026 Snow Fellowships
💊 ADHD prescriptions are surging, with ~838k patients & 6.7M scripts in 2025, up 25% year-on-year
🎧 Cochlear is ramping up US lobbying efforts as potential tariffs threaten access to its hearing implants in the world’s largest healthcare market
⚠️ NDIS providers are submitting illegible handwritten invoices for payments worth 1000s, raising concerns about fraud and errors in the $50B scheme
One provider found ~30% of 200,000 monthly invoices couldn’t be processed automatically
🍏 LuminaX’s 2026 accelerator selected 10 healthtech startups for their new cohort ft. a shift toward preventative & early-stage care
🚀 MedTech Actuator selected 15 startups for its 2026 Accelerator Cohort 11 ft. AI wearables, cancer diagnostics, women’s health devices & digital therapeutics
📱 Spoony will shut down despite reaching 65k users, as investors shift funding toward AI-driven startups over traditional social platforms
⚠️ Australian research leaders are urging the Gov to act on a growing “brain drain” crisis and lack of funding, warning the country risks losing a generation of scientists
A letter co-signed by 63 leaders calls for unlocking $1B annual MRFF funding, stabilising research careers, and fixing fragmentation, as funding success rates fall to ~4% for early- and mid-career researchers
US & Beyond the Borders
💰 WHOOP raised $575M at a $10.1B valuation to scale its global personalised health platform & was selected for Medicare’s ACCESS program, enabling eligible patients to receive the wearable as part of their clinical care
📊 Rock Health’s Q1 2026 report revealed digital health funding reached $4B across 110 deals, with capital increasingly concentrated in mega-rounds
59% of funding came from just 12 deals ($100M+), as AI becomes table stakes across healthcare startups & investors double down on fewer, larger bets
🧪 Life Biosciences, co-founded by David Sinclair, raised $80M to advance a one-time anti-ageing gene therapy into clinical trials, aiming to “rewind” cellular ageing
🧬 Protocole emerged from stealth with a $6M seed round to build a clinical-grade peptide platform with physician oversight
🧠 Women’s brain health is a $1T global economic opportunity, driven by underinvestment in conditions like Alzheimer’s, menopause & mental health
Women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health & make up ~⅔ of Alzheimer’s patients, yet only ~6% of healthcare investment targets women’s health
🧪 Stipple Bio raised an $100M Series A to advance its precision oncology pipeline & lead drug STP-100 into clinical trials
🏋️ Gym membership hit a record 81M Americans in 2025 (26.1% of the population), with participation surpassing 100M+ people & 7B annual visits
💰 Unilever acquired Grüns for $1.2B, doubling down on functional gummy supplements
🖊️ Remedy Place launched its first smart NAD+ pen in partnership with NADclinic to bring at‑home self‑injection of clinical‑grade NAD+ to consumers across its U.S. wellness clubs
✨ Moxie raised $25M in Series C to expand its clinical‑grade operating system & Scale Suite for independent aesthetic practices
🏋️ Hyrox has exploded with 1.5M+ participants across 30 countries & races now selling out in minutes
🥇 F45 launched PEAK500, a 30‑minute in‑studio competition, to double down on hybrid fitness & “fitness‑as‑a‑sport” as it sponsors 12 global HYROX events & builds a larger event platform beyond the studio
🧠 Inflow is joining Cerebral, bringing its ADHD‑focused digital‑therapy platform into a broader mental‑health ecosystem to expand continuous, tech‑enabled care for more people
💊 Superpower raised US$42M led by Forerunner Ventures to grow its AI-driven peptide health platform & clinical research capabilities
🥤 Danone acquired UK-based Huel for ~EUR1bn to expand its footprint in the growing functional nutrition & protein shake market
💍 Oura is in talks with investment banks to launch an IPO as early as this year
And partnered with Vida Health to integrate wearable data into virtual care programs, bringing ring insights into clinical decision-making
🩺 Samsung launched blood‑pressure monitoring in Samsung Health for select Galaxy Watch users, adding to its suite of FDA‑cleared tools like sleep‑apnea detection & ECG
🤖 Medvi, an AI-powered telehealth startup founded by Matthew Gallagher scaled to an estimated $1.8B annual revenue, selling GLP‑1 weight‑loss drugs & men’s‑health products with just 2 employees
But, sparked a lot of discussion about fraud, ethics and safe care
🏋️♂️ Nike shut down all Nike Studios boutique fitness locations, ending its in-person gym experiment launched in 2023
🌐 China has fully connected wearable‑device data to its national healthcare & insurance system, turning continuous‑monitoring streams into medical‑insurance inputs
🧬 Researchers used CRISPR & mRNA tech to create a personalised gene-editing therapy for a baby with a rare disease in just six months
💉 Scientists are developing “universal” or “everything vaccines” that could protect against multiple viruses, bacteria & even allergens with a single shot
🌡️ Peri launched a wearable device for perimenopause, designed to track symptoms like hot flashes & night sweats in real time
🤖 AI Updates
✨ Perplexity AI launched Perplexity Health, the only platform for Pro & Max users that integrates data from wearables & 1.7M+ medical records to track health trends & generate AI‑driven wellness recommendations
🩺 Google/Fitbit is rolling out its Gemini‑powered Personal Health Coach, now capable of integrating medical records with wearable data to deliver AI‑driven, context‑aware health guidance
🤝 OpenEvidence & Tandem partnered to connect AI‑powered clinical‑decision support with automated prior-authorisation & prescription routing, closing the gap between evidence‑based treatment plans & real‑time patient access to medications
🧬 Anthropic acquired Coefficient Bio, an AI‑driven biotech with fewer than 10 employees & eight months of stealth, in an $400M all‑stock deal, bringing a compact, Genentech‑experienced team into Claude for Life Sciences & signalling that AI‑native computational‑biology talent is now a top‑tier strategic asset
🧠 A new paper argues that AI’s biggest healthcare impact may not be efficiency, but a re‑imagining of specialty care
🧬 Diadia Health launched its AI causal‑reasoning platform, helping clinicians uncover root‑cause drivers in complex chronic & hormonal conditions where standard labs show “normal” results
⚠️ AI disease prediction models for stroke & diabetes are being trained on potentially fabricated or unverifiable datasets ---> Researchers found 124 studies using questionable data, with some models already used in the clinical setting
🧬 Goodfire & Mayo Clinic developed an AI model that can predict & explain the impact of 4.2M genetic variants across the human genome ----> The system achieved state-of-the-art accuracy (0.997 AUROC) & generates human-readable explanations for previously unknown variants
Sick Science
🫁 Does Vaping Cause Lung Cancer?
UNSW-led review in Carcinogenesis concludes nicotine vapes likely cause lung & oral cancers independent of smoking, based on clinical, animal, & lab evidence of carcinogens in e-cig aerosols. Multidisciplinary analysis by cancer experts, pharmacists, & epidemiologists found consistent risks across disciplines, though exact case numbers await long-term data. This challenges vaping’s harm-reduction narrative, urging focus beyond its role as a smoking gateway
💊 Low Vitamin D in 40s Raises Dementia Risk?
A 2026 Neurology study of 793 healthy adults found higher vitamin D blood levels at age 39 linked to less harmful tau protein buildup in the brain 16 years later, spotted on special PET scans. Low vitamin D speeds up tau, an early sign of Alzheimer’s before memory loss starts, but didn’t affect another protein called amyloid. Getting enough vitamin D young might protect your brain later
😺 AI can rank unmet medical needs across 22,701 diseases in just 1 hour?
A 2026 PLoS Medicine study developed an LLM-based method using GPT-4o to score unmet medical need for all 22,701 diseases in the MONDO ontology, assessing 11 criteria across patient suffering & accessibility. Scores, weighted to prioritise rare diseases lacking effective treatments with high mortality/morbidity, were generated in ~1 hour for $120, closely matching expert ratings (e.g., ρ=0.845 for mortality) with strong inter-expert agreement (95% within 1 point)
Startup Stuff 🚀
Got a big idea & looking for the right launchpad?
Antler is now taking applications for its global Residency Program, where exceptional founders come together to build & scale world-changing startups. It’s a full-time, in-person opportunity to find your co-founder, validate your idea, & tap into Antler’s global network of investors & mentors - More here
Looking to put your deep tech venture on the national stage?
Powered by Cicada x Tech23, the program is a curated platform for Australia’s most promising science & engineering-led startups to connect with investors, industry leaders, & key decision-makers. Selected ventures gain national recognition, high-value connections, & access to a strong deep tech community. Apply by 30 April - More here
Building the next wave of Australian biotech?
Jumar Bioincubator is Australia’s newest biotech incubator, co‑located in Melbourne with a leading biopharmaceutical company & supported by WEHI, CSL, the University of Melbourne, & Breakthrough Victoria. It offers early‑stage ventures world‑class labs, research commercialisation support, & access to a strong national network to help translate cutting‑edge science into real‑world treatments - More here
Ready to accelerate your therapeutic project?
Applications are now open for the Pipeline Accelerator 2025–26 Round 2 Vouchers, offering up to $50,000 in funding (with at least 50% co‑investment) to support early‑stage therapeutic development. Backed by Phenomics Australia, Therapeutic Innovation Australia (TIA), ANSTO’s National Deuteration Facility, & Bioplatforms Australia, the program gives researchers & SMEs access to national research infrastructure & translation expertise across the full pipeline from molecules to clinical trials - More here
Planning to take your life‑sciences startup global in 2026?
MTPConnect’s International Conference Delegations Program is rolling out a packed calendar of overseas conferences & site visits to help Australian medtech, biotech, pharma, & digital‑health companies access international markets, investors, & supply chains.
Delegations cover key events like BIO‑Europe Spring (Lisbon), BIO Middle East (Riyadh), The MedTech Conference (Boston), BIO (San Diego), & BIO KOREA / BIO Asia‑Taiwan, with tailored site‑visit programs & Australian pavilions or industry events in each region. - More here
Events💥
22nd Apr: Commercialisation Grant Development Workshop (Perth)
22nd Apr: BioSymposium - Next-gen Biosensing: Breakthroughs in technology & translation (Melb)
28th Apr: Building Regulatory & Trial Readiness for Medical Devices & SaMD - HealthTech Hub Masterclass (Syd)
15th May: BioMelbourne Network 2026 | Connecting Women Lunch (Melb)
19 - 21st May: AusMedtech 2026 (Perth)
20 - 21st May: Digital Health Festival (Melb)
27 - 28th May: PTA Congress (Syd)
28th May: Breaking the Silos: The Women’s Health MedTech Summit (Syd)
Cool Content 💎
🐙 Frazis Capital Partners: We Grew Human Brain Cells on a Chip & Taught Them to Play Doom
📟 Fast Company List: The Most Innovative Medical Device Companies of 2026
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Adios for now,
👋 Emily,
Mariah & Team WTH
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