Joe Braidwood

🧬 This week’s Austin Bio & Health Roundup brings new funding, partnerships, fresh data to pore over, and both a Nobel and a Genius Grant. 🧬 💰 Funding & Capital Signals Sensi.AI raised $45M Series C to scale its in-home AI care intelligence for aging safely at home. 🤝 Partnerships & M&A Thatch announced two big partnerships this week: They are now live inside ADP RUN and added Superpower to the Thatch Marketplace. Form Bio, building AI solutions and tools for genomic medicine, and Cure Rare Disease partnered to accelerate genetic medicine development, starting with Duchenne. Merit Medicine, a healthcare analytics company, integrated WTW's HealthMAPS into its predictive analytics platform. 🔬 Research & Medical Advancements Paradromics introduced SONIC, an open BCI benchmark; Connexus reported 200+ bits per second. 🏆 Recognition UT Austin structural biologist Jason McLellan was named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, better known as the genius grants. 📊 Data Rock Health reports $9.9B in venture capital YTD across 351 digital health deals, pacing for the strongest year since 2022. 42% of funding went to clinical and nonclinical workflow tools. 🤠 Texas Bio Triangle Houston: Coya Therapeutics, Inc. scientific advisor Shimon Sakaguchi won the 2025 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine for regulatory T cells. Houston: CTMC and Brazil’s Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein launched the Global Cell Therapy Network Alliance. What’s Next? 🤠 🚀 🦾 🧬

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Pangram CEO and co-founder, Max Spero sat down with School For Startups Radio to talk about the successful fundraising round of Pangram Labs and their disruptive technology to detect AI writing. Learn a bit of the Pangram back story including how Max and co-founder Bradley Emi (both Stanford grads) hatched Pangram. Now it is regarded as the most accurate AI detector on the market. Roughly paraphrased, Max says that Pangram is so accurate because it has learned the "specific nuances" that make it possible to recognize different AI models. #AI #AIdetection #education https://lnkd.in/g95pmjEg

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TheFounderVC has a truly compelling team - entrepreneurs and operators that have scaled from 0-1 and to exits across a variety of markets - some of whom are fellow classmates. They have built strong founder and VC networks over the last 25 years in tech and are now leveraging that access and experience on behalf of their portfolio. It clearly resonates with founders, as their early portfolio is truly compelling.

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Beyond the Headlines: Why the OpenEvidence & JAMA Partnership Signals a New Era in Physician-Centered AI Over the past 8 months, I've dedicated my time not just tracking trends, but deeply analyzing what truly matters across the ecosystem, especially for physicians, who remain the central decision-makers in care delivery. While there's a lot of buzz around generative AI in health, the reality is more nuanced: for physicians, the challenge isn’t about accessing more information , it’s about synthesizing the overwhelming volume of clinical data and turning it into actionable knowledge at the point of care. ⚠️ Physicians aren’t drowning in data , they’re drowning in disconnected knowledge. And the consequence? Rising cognitive burden and moral distress. That’s why the recent partnership between OpenEvidence and the JAMA Network is a strategic response to a systemic problem in modern medicine and a brilliant move by Daniel Nadler and his team. 🧠 JAMA + OpenEvidence = Smarter, Contextualized Clinical Decisions Building on prior collaborations with NEJM and Elsevier, OpenEvidence is leveraging its AI/LLM capabilities to go beyond search and deliver context-aware synthesis of evidence-based medicine , precisely when clinicians need it most. This collaboration combines: JAMA’s unmatched depth and authority in medical literature OpenEvidence’s intelligent infrastructure designed to surface only the most relevant, verified, and timely insights A user-centric design philosophy grounded in the real-world needs of overburdened specialties like primary care This is about delivering just-in-time, trustworthy knowledge that directly reduces physician burnout, enhances care quality, and closes dangerous knowledge gaps. 📍Over the past 8 months, I, alongside Brad Taylor , thought deeply about this problem and opportunity in the physician landscape. Thank you Brad Taylor for letting me recruit you and bringing your deep Healthtech expertise to this project! 💡 What’s the larger implication? Medical search is evolving, becoming synthesized, smart, and situational. AI in medicine is no longer just about automation , it’s about augmentation with accountability. This partnership raises the bar on what responsible AI should look like in healthcare, human-centered, clinically relevant, and purpose-built. ⚖️ The standard for AI in medicine just got higher .  Which is important, as Healthcare is built on Trust.Integrity.Collaboration. #OpenEvidence #JAMANetwork #AIinHealthcare #ClinicalDecisionSupport #PhysicianEmpowerment #HealthTech #MedicalEducation #HealthcareInnovation #AI

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New this morning - Elad Walach and Aidoc receive $150M from General Catalyst, Square Peg, NVIDIA, Sutter Health, Hartford HealthCare, Mercy and WellSpan Health. It's been the year of $100M-plus funding rounds for later-stage AI companies. Aidoc will use the funding to accelerate the development of CARE, its clinical AI foundation mode. More below 👇

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Scoop on Gradient Ventures spinning out of Google. It's now a fully independent firm owned by managing partners, Darian Shirazi and Zach Bratun-Glennon. The firm’s principals wanted Gradient to become a fully independent firm, sources said, because some startup founders are hesitant to take capital from strategic investors. That's a growing concern in the hotly competitive AI landscape. https://lnkd.in/e7eU8ive

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Procode is at the forefront of pairing AI with services businesses to transform legacy industries. We're incredibly excited to back Jeff Cripe, Kameron Rezzadeh, James Baez-Silva, and the whole Procode AI team. The speed with which Procode has entered the market, transformed the margin of the underlying operating company, AND created a better customer-facing product is special. As the son of a surgeon, I am grateful to the Procode team for creating a product that finally gives doctors visibility into how they're paid. Looking forward to a great journey together.

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Way to go Healthier Capital portfolio company Medeloop on their relationship with HealthVerity to bring agentic AI analytics capabilities to large data sets to advance healthcare analytics and science! https://lnkd.in/g2F-nz-K

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I’m in San Francisco this week for the @J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, and the big news so far is Anthropic’s launch of Claude for Healthcare. Anthropic is rolling out generative AI tools built for health systems and payers. The emphasis is on working inside regulated environments and supporting practical needs like prior authorization, care coordination, and documentation. The move comes shortly after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Health and OpenAI for Healthcare last week, underscoring how quickly major AI players are moving into the healthcare space. Supreme Communications client Carta Healthcare is part of the launch, with a case study included in Anthropic’s announcement. For Carta Healthcare’s customers, this means AI models that better understand clinical records and support more consistent data extraction, even as documentation formats evolve. Taken together, these developments reflect a broader priority across healthcare to work more efficiently with complex data while staying within regulatory and reimbursement constraints. Read the full story in Fierce Healthcare : https://lnkd.in/eKK8NMYZ

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Exciting to see the incredible progress from Peptone, a company we’ve backed since the early days at Walden Catalyst Ventures. Peptone just announced Peptron-O, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA — a groundbreaking AI engine that brings ensemble-first structure prediction to the disordered proteome. This is a major scientific and technological milestone, targeting one of the most complex and previously inaccessible areas of biology: intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). By shifting the paradigm from static models to dynamic ensembles, Peptron-O opens new doors for drug discovery — especially in areas like oncology and neurodegeneration, where IDPs play critical roles. We’re proud to have supported Peptone on their mission to build the infrastructure for next-gen molecular physics. Their work is a great example of how deep tech can transform life sciences. Read more about the announcement: 👉 https://lnkd.in/eygnKQ67 #AI #Biotech #DrugDiscovery #DeepTech #LifeSciences #WaldenCatalyst #Peptone #NVIDIA #PeptronO with: Kamil Tamiola, Ph.D. Francis Ho Shankar Chandran Nicolas Autret Andy Kau Roni Hefetz Victoria Slivkoff

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I met Craig Limoli, Founder and CEO of Wellsheet, in 2019. Craig was presenting at the Ai4 Healthcare Conference in New York City, hosted by Michael J Weiss . It was one of those early gatherings focused on AI in healthcare - well before the recent wave of hype. Craig took the stage to share how Wellsheet was using AI to help doctors and nurses make better, faster decisions at the point of care with its Care Team Copilot. Wellsheet’s technology was impressive, but its real edge came from Craig’s deep understanding of the problem he was solving. Before founding Wellsheet, he worked at IBM as a strategy consultant, helping large health systems assess their tech stacks. He saw firsthand that the tools available were clunky, fragmented, and ultimately failed to support the clinicians doing the hardest work. It’s a story as old as time - the very systems IBM was selling to hospitals weren’t meeting their actual needs. So, Craig left IBM, enrolled in the The Wharton School MBA program to sharpen his entrepreneurial skills, and decided to build the product those systems truly needed - a Care Team Copilot designed to summarize patient charts, streamline documentation, and support real-time collaboration between physicians and nurses. We stayed in touch after that first meeting, and a few months later, Wellsheet raised its $4.5 million Series A, which our team at SpringTide Ventures led. The round came together just as the world was shutting down in the early months of the pandemic. Understandably, Craig was nervous that investors might pull back as uncertainty swept through the market, but we didn’t. We believed in Wellsheet’s mission, and more importantly, in Craig’s ability to execute against it. Despite the chaos of 2020, he stayed focused and transparent - qualities that made us even more confident we were backing the right founder at the right time. Fast forward to today: Wellsheet is now live at hundreds of hospitals and continues to outperform much larger competitors. In fact, when a major national health system evaluated solutions from both Google and Wellsheet, they unanimously chose Wellsheet. The healthcare industry faces an unprecedented shortage of doctors, nurses, and frontline clinicians. Wellsheet’s technology helps address this challenge by automating the most time-consuming and manual parts of clinical work. For physicians, it means no more laborious data entry; for executives, it means decisions are queued up for them - clear, informed, and ready to act on. By streamlining chart reviews, documentation, and decision support, Wellsheet enables care teams to focus on what truly matters: delivering better patient outcomes. We’re proud to support, and keep championing founders like Craig and his mission-driven team at Wellsheet!

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