NEA, Khosla leading VCs in healthcare investments

PitchBook Platform shares the four biggest venture capital investors in healthcare tech

(Vator will be holding its second annual Splash Health event at the Kaiser Center in Oakland on February 23rd. Speakers will include Ryan Howard, Founder of Practice Fusion; Ali Diab, CEO of Collective Health; Helmy Eltoukhy, Founder & CEO of Guardant Health; and Rick Altinger, CEO of Glooko. Get your tickets here!)

Venture capital is hot for various technology industries right now, and it’s no less true for healthcare.

Since 2010, health-focused startups have raised $7.65 billion from VC firms, according to the PitchBook Platform. That number’s growing thanks to increasing interest in the space: PitchBook says 62 deals closed in 2010, while 265 deals closed last year—over 4X growth. Additionally, 46.3 percent of last year’s deals were early-stage rounds, while 31.6 percent were late-stage, providing more evidence that the space still has room to grow.    

Providing insight into who’s been doing all the investing since the start of 2010, PitchBook shared the four biggest VC investors based on number of deals:

1. New Enterprise Associates (13): NEA invests in companies at all stages of growth across the healthcare landscape. That includes companies developing new therapies for diseases, IT providers revamping the healthcare delivery system, as well as medical device makers. Along with Founders Fund, NEA led the $38 milion Series B round for Collective Health in March 2015. (Ali Diab, founder and CEO of Collective Health, will be speaking at Vator Splash Health next week.) 

2. Khosla Ventures (12): From advertising and big data to space and transportation, Khosla Ventures doesn't limit itself by any specific category. The company has invested in Adamant (developer of mobile chemical sensor device), Guardant Health (non-invasive cancer screening blood test), and ZocDoc (doctor directory and appointment booking).

“Technology will reinvent healthcare as we know it,” wrote the firm’s founder Vinod Khosla last August. “It is inevitable that, in the future, the majority of physicians’ diagnostic, prescription and monitoring, which over time may approach 80-percent of total doctor time spent on medicine, will be replaced by smart hardware, software, and testing. [...] The remaining 20-percent of physicians’ work will be AMPLIFIED, making them even more effective, and allowing even the average physician or nurse to perform at the level of the very best specialists."

3. Qualcomm Ventures (11): As Qualcomm's investment arm, Qualcomm Ventures obviously leans heavily toward telecommunications investments, but the company also invests in virtual reality, robotics, and healthcare. One of the firm’s portfolio companies, predictive healthcare analytics provider Predilytics, was acquired by Welltok in May 2015.

4. Sandbox Industries (10): Based in Chicago, Sandbox Industries is the only firm on this list not headquartered in California. The firm has ties to the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association's venture fund, making it clear why the firm has invested in many healthcare startups. As I shared in my market story last week, healthcare is one of those tech sectors that remained unscathed by global market decline last quarter.

While the sharing economy and financial technology saw pretty large drops in VC funding, data from CB Insights found that digital health companies received $1.1 billion across 109 deals in the fourth quarter of 2015.