#92 🍩 Everlab's $65M, Midjourney goes medical & proteinmaxxing
What is happening in health tech & innovation?
Hey team,
Happy Friday! It’s finally happened: TechBio and longevity are well beyond mainstream…
With the non-stop +$100 M raises for longevity and AI drug discovery, Claude and even Meta going into TechBio, and the first AI-developed drug entering Phase III trials - it’s safe to say this trend is well and truly underway.
🧬 PS - check out how the Chair or Standford Medicine used Claude to analyse his Genome
Anyway, if you’ve followed along for the last +3 years, you’d know I’m an OG Oura and preventative health nerd.
Data + knowledge = power.
The last few months I’ve been testing out the Ultrahuman Air💍 💪 (side by side with my Oura) thanks to the lovely UltraHuman folk.
Not going to lie - loving the integrations and no monthly subscription
I’ll bring you a full side-by-side review soon, but for now - they’re offering all WTH readers 22% off!
So if you do want an affordable kicker wearable and aren’t yet a part of the WHOOP or Oura cults, check it out.
Use code: EMILYCASEY22
Ends July 13th
**Yes, I do get affiliates, but they aren’t paying me for this cause you know I only tell you about things I actually like
🍩 TODAY’S ISSUE
Noteworthy
Funding
Newsworthy
AI Updates
Sick Science
Startup Stuff
Events
Cool Content
Noteworthy 🗞️
Funding
🍏 Everlab raised $65M led by Airtree Ventures at a ~$500M valuation, to scale its AI diagnostic screening platform globally.
The Melb startup has 20K patients, 21M+ biomarker results processed has UK expansion up next
👩⚕️ Medical Angels announced its first doctor-led fund targeting $40M for Aussie healthtech
🧠 Fluent raised $2M pre-seed to develop its sub-scalp BCI for people with speech loss from MND and MS
🩷 Ovum raised $4M in seed funding after tripling its valuation, to scale its AI women's health platform
🧬 Atisama Therapeutics received $15M+ MRFF funding to advance RB042, an inhaled RNA therapy for COPD, into Phase 1a/1b clinical trials
🦷 Dentroid raised $32M for Nuralyte,its LED light-based device that numbs dental pain without needles and got a commercial deal Read more
🔬 Novartis is aquiring Myricx Bio, a novel next-generation class of antibody-drug conjugates for cancer, for up to US$1.5B with US$1.1B upfront plus milestones
This Brandon Capital portfolio company, spun out of Imperial College London, is delivering nice returns for LPs and finally seeing returns flow in for biotech
Now, if only we can make it happen more for Aussie based spinouts…
Newsworthy
🎓 USYD is hunting $200M+ for a new venture fund to commercialise its deep tech & biotech research as spinout companies, inviting potential partners to co-invest
🩺 Heidi Health published a deep dive on fine-tuning its own clinical AI model to frontier parity, replacing the best frontier model in its Evidence product with one a fraction of the size
🏥 Bupa agreed to acquire Partnered Health Group from Quadrant Private Equity, adding 68 primary care clinics, 3 urgent care sites & 5 corporate health brands
💊 ~1 in 5 Aussies are being prescribed mental health medication, with 5.2M people on antidepressants & ADHD prescriptions tripling over the past decade
🚀 LaunchVic announced $3.5M for nine AI & deep tech pre-accelerator programs across Vic, with recipients including Cicada Innovations & MedTech Actuator
👶 The AFR warns childcare is shaping up as “the next NDIS” as a budget pressure, with the gov dropping an unbudgeted $3.6B to subsidise childcare worker wages for another 18 months after the “one-off” retention payment ran out
⚠️ Private health bosses warn up to 200k Aussies will downgrade their top-tier health cover due to cost-of-living pressures & Labor’s axed rebate for over-65s
🫀 Auckland's HeartLab inked a deal with Advara HeartCare, Aus's largest cardiology chain, rolling out its AI cardiac imaging software across 100 clinics
📚 VicHealth made 20+ years of health promotion research available for free in one place via the new VicHealth Research Library
🦷 Dentroid, Canberra medtech, hit a $265M valuation after partnering with French dental giant Septodont to commercialise Nuralyte, a device that uses bursts of light to replace dental anaesthetic injections
🦷 National Dental Care, one of Aus's largest dental networks with 100+ clinics, is up for sale after 13 years under Crescent Capital Partners
Morgan Stanley has been hired to run the process, with the deal expected to exceed $700M at a 12x earnings multiple
🏆 Remy Tucker, founder of On The House, was named 7NEWS Young Achiever of the Year
💊 Sigma Healthcare (owner of Chemist Warehouse) has pulled out of talks to buy UK pharmacy chain Boots
🎓 ANU received a $4.5M philanthropic gift to advance personalised medicine research
🏅 UniMelb's A/Prof Garron Dodd won the NHMRC Marshall & Warren Innovation Award for his research into why drugs like Ozempic lose effectiveness over time
🔄 MTPConnect has rebranded to AUScelerate, adopting a new name & identity as it enters its next decade🔒 Monash IVF and Medmate breached the Privacy Act by using Meta and TikTok tracking pixels to collect sensitive health data without consent
🫁 4D Medical got TGA approval for its CT:VQ™ tech, enabling ventilation and perfusion imaging derived directly from routine chest CT scans, without contrast agents, radiotracers or dedicated nuclear medicine infrastructure
❤️ UNSW Sydney built a fully synthetic soft robotic heart that can mimic disease and provide a realistic environment for testing cardiac devices
📱 Defeat Diabetes’s found you could reverse diabetes through a digital program on nutrition education and behaviour change
The La Trobe University 12 month study found 78% of participants improved HbA1c, 42% dropped below the diagnostic threshold for type 2 diabetes, and 18% achieved full remission without glucose-lowering medication
📊 My Health Record is now finally sharing pathology and diagnostic imaging results by default from 1 July
📋 The Registered nurse prescribing reform laws have passed, allowing endorsed registered nurses to collaboratively prescribe PBS medicines starting October 2026
US & Beyond the Borders
💪 NewLimit raised $435M Series C led by Founders Fund (Peter Thiel), with Thrive Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Eli Lilly Ventures and others
Founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, the longevity biotech is developing epigenetic reprogramming medicines that reverse cellular ageing starting with a liver program heading into human trials next year
🧬 Insilico Medicine has the world’s first AI drug to enter Phase III trials, with Rentosertib being a target identified by AI, molecule designed by generative AI, now in Phase III for IPF
⌚ Clair Health, founded by a 21-year-old Stanford grad, raised $11.6M led by Khosla Ventures to build the first non-invasive continuous hormone monitor for women
The wristband uses 10 biosensors to track estrogen, progesterone, LH & FSH without blood draws
⌚ WHOOP partnered with HealthEx to let US members connect their medical records directly within the app
aaaand ⌚ the FDA dropped its enforcement action against WHOOP over its blood pressure feature after the company tweaked its messaging, ending a year-long standoff
🥛 US whey protein inventories have fallen by half since 2023 with prices surging 250% year-on-year
🍎 Apple launched perimenopause & menopause support in its Health app, with symptom logging, educational content & cycle-deviation notifications
🤖 Insilico Medicine & SK Biopharmaceuticals also signed a US$2.5B R&D collaboration to discover AI drug candidates for neuroimmune CNS disorders
🧬 Novartis & Antares Therapeutics signed a strategic collaboration with US$105M upfront and up to $1.8B in additional milestones to develop first-in-class small molecule therapies against historically undruggable oncology targets
🏥 Medtronic is bringing Corsano Health’s FDA-cleared, medical-grade, multi-parameter wearable to US hospitals and hospital-at-home programs.
🧠 Temple, a brain-tracking wearable startup founded by Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal, raised $54M seed for Entropy™, a new device tracking proprietary biomarker that tracks real-time metabolic and stress load via blood flow patterns at the temple
🤖 AI Updates
🌏 Anthropic:
Dropped Claude Fable 5 & Mythos 5, its most powerful AI models yet, before briefly suspending access three days later over safety concerns
AND launched Claude Science, a dedicated AI workbench for life science researchers with 60+ functions across genomics, proteomics, structural biology and cheminformatics, whilst low-key announcing its own internal drug discovery program for neglected diseases
The same company that upended coding is now coming for drug discovery
🤯 Midjourney, the AI image company, announced Midjourney Medical, a full-body ultrasonic scanner that produces MRI-quality images in 60 secs with no radiation, powered by 500K sensors & Butterfly Network hardware
🧬 Ex-Anthropic researchers Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta launched Mirendil with $200M seed to build “AI for AI for science” - self-improving AI models to run drug discovery, chemistry and biology research at universities and labs that can’t afford frontier AI infra
🧬 Superpower launched OrganAge, the world's first organ aging test from a single blood draw, developed with Stanford's Dr David Furman & the Buck Institute
🩺 Abridge unveiled the first AI-native clinician intelligence platform at its NYC keynote
📈 PwC projects US medical costs will rise 9% in 2027, the highest in 17 years, with healthcare spending on track to hit $9T annually by 2035
70% of health plans now rank providers' use of AI coding tools as a top-three cost driver
🧠 Verge Labs (backed by Eli Lilly, BlackRock & YC) released vBx-1.0, a foundation model for precision neurology that reconstructs the molecular state of a patient's brain from a routine blood draw
📊 CSIRO released its AI Trends for Healthcare 2026 report - saying AI is off the sidelines of healthcare now (no duh)
Sick Science
📱 Can Your Smartphone Passively Monitor Your Heart Rate?
A 2026 Nature study by Google Research validated a deep-learning system that measures heart rate through your smartphone's front camera during normal daily use, no wearable needed. Tested on 162,546 videos from 211 participants, the system achieved less than 10% error compared to ECGs across light, medium & dark skin tones, and estimated resting heart rate within 5 beats per minute of a wearable tracker.
💉 Does Your Menstrual Cycle Phase Affect Vaccine Response?
A 2026 npj Women's Health study of 1,474 women using the Clue period tracking app found that those vaccinated during their follicular phase (estrogen-dominant) had 35% higher odds of side effects but stayed infection-free 35 days longer than those vaccinated during the luteal phase (progesterone-dominant). The findings suggest menstrual cycle timing could matter for vaccine effectiveness, yet cycle phase is almost never considered in immunisation research or clinical trials.
Startup Stuff 🚀
Idea or Pre-seed stage and building anything deeptech ot health?
Illume Ventures Future Frontier 2026 is takeing applications open for its program backing early-stage founders working on complex, hard problems in health, sustainability, and enterprise. Equity-based, with mentorship, networks and follow-on support - More here
Working on mRNA-based therapeutics or vaccine research?
BioNTech Australia in partnership with the A-RNA Association has opened the 2026 mRNA Innovator Award Program, offering AUD$50K (half cash, half in-kind mRNA supply from BioNTech’s R&D lab) for preclinical mRNA research. Open to researchers & companies across Australia & New Zealand. Applications close 31 July - More here
Got a digital health innovation tackling global challenges?
The Future of Health Grant supports early-stage digital health startups through a Swiss-based accelerator with mentoring, clinical access & funding. Applications close 31 July - More here
Got a health tech idea & based in Victoria?
MedTech Actuator’s Origin Australia program is a two-phase venture-building journey for emerging health entrepreneurs, from pitch bootcamp to demo day. The winner takes home a $10K non-dilutive cash prize & return travel to compete at the Global Pitch Showdown in Japan. Open to clinicians, researchers, engineers & aspiring founders. Applications close 5 July - More here
Building an AI-driven startup in Australia or New Zealand?
Google for Startups Accelerator: ANZ is now accepting applications for its 10-week equity-free program for Seed to Series A startups. Includes dedicated Google mentors, access to AI products & Cloud TPUs, technical bootcamps & deep dives on product, growth & leadership. Applications open now - More here
Events💥
23 - 24th July: MedTech Actuator Origin: Pitch Bootcamp (Melb)
27 July: Bio Connections Australia (Melb)
29th July: ANDHealth Unfiltered: Digital Health Summit (Melb)
7th Aug: Cicada xTech23 (Syd)
2nd Sep: MedTech Actuator Origin: Demo Day (Melb)
Cool Content 💎
🎧 No Priors Pod: “Curing All Disease by next century is too conservative” Priscilla Chan & Mark Zuckerberg on newly announced biohubAI for science and medicine
🎙️ Bain & Company: AI & the future of pharma with Bob Bradway, CEO of Amgen
📖 Dr Mike Evans (ex-Apple Health team): The Future of Wearables: Why Self-Measurement is Both Over & Under-Hyped
📊 NVIDIA: State of AI in Healthcare & Life Sciences: 2026 Trends
70% of healthcare orgs now actively deploy AI (up from 63%), 85% report revenue gains & nearly half are increasing budgets by 10%+. The pilot era is officially over
📝 Galen Growth: H1 2026 Digital Health Funding Review
📰 Second Opinion: The $100B Paradox: Why the Largest Company in Healthcare Hasn’t Been Built Yet
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👋 Emily,
Mariah & Team WTH
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