Healthleap AI funding has reached $38 million, split between a seed round and a Series A, as the company works to scale a platform that reads patient records to identify people at risk of undiagnosed illnesses. The startup confirmed the raise exclusively, though it is not disclosing its valuation.
The financing includes an $8 million seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, and a $30 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures. The new capital will support engineering, product, sales, and customer success as Healthleap adds support for identifying more conditions.
What Healthleap Does
Founded in South Africa in 2022 by siblings Jemima and Josiah Meyer, the startup initially offered a clinical nutrition tool Jemima had built for dietitians. The company later pivoted and built a more general-purpose platform that aims to identify patients admitted to hospitals who may be suffering from conditions like malnutrition or delirium that aren’t often identified early enough, CEO and co-founder Josiah Meyer said.
“A patient’s chart holds two kinds of data. 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. Our developing approach is extracting affirmative or negated mentions of these clinical concepts in an easily extensible and scalable way,” Josiah said.
The company’s platform is currently deployed in more than 50 hospitals, where it screens patients for conditions such as malnutrition and delirium. The startup has also built programs to identify aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers, and risk of readmission for congestive heart failure, which Josiah said are undergoing further clinical validation.
How the Platform Works
To find patients that may be at risk of an illness or were undiagnosed, Healthleap plugs into a hospital’s electronic health record system and uses language models to pull information from written notes, such as references to recent weight loss or difficulty swallowing. That analysis is then fed into its risk models, alongside structured information such as lab reports and vitals to surface patients who may need a closer look. The company notes that its software doesn’t diagnose patients, only highlights items for additional review.
“Each night, we analyze every adult inpatient’s record: lab results, vital signs, weights, medications, diet orders, diagnoses, clinicians’ notes, and more,” Josiah explained. “Each morning, we write a risk score into the care team’s existing workflow with a dashboard accessible that holds additional information about the patients’ trends.”
Why Malnutrition Matters
Malnutrition likely served as a useful starting point for Healthleap, as it’s a condition that often goes undiagnosed and can adversely impact patient recovery in a variety of ways. Research suggests 20% to 50% of hospital inpatients are malnourished, and some studies have linked malnutrition with longer stays, impaired wound healing, infections, and other complications, as well as higher morbidity and mortality.
Growth and Customers
Josiah said Healthleap has grown from three hospital partners to more than 50 over the past year. Its customers now include Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist, and Emory Healthcare. Revenue has grown more than 10x over the same period, he said, though he didn’t disclose specifics.
Pricing and ROI
The startup sells three-year contracts priced according to a hospital’s licensed bed count, and also uses an outcome-based pricing model. “We use the hard ROI that the hospital finance team validates and attributes to us as the measurable ROI. Based on that, we contractually ensure that we deliver multiples of the contract price. To date, every customer has seen a 5x hard ROI or more, in some cases over 20x annual total ROI,” Josiah said.
At the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Healthleap says its malnutrition program resulted in $23.8 million in annualized financial impact, of which $6.3 million came from additional reimbursement and $17.5 million from shorter hospital stays.
What’s Next for Healthleap AI Funding
With the new capital in place, Healthleap plans to spend on engineering, product, sales, and customer success as it adds support for identifying more conditions. Josiah said the company ultimately wants to cover more than 40 major health conditions and expand into outpatient and home care.
That ambition rests on the same core idea that has driven the platform since its pivot: the most telling clinical signals often sit in written notes rather than structured fields, and catching them early can change a patient’s course of care. The Healthleap AI funding round gives the company room to test that idea across more conditions, more hospitals, and eventually more care settings beyond the inpatient ward.
