Brendan Kennedy

𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗘𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗥𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗲𝘀 $𝟮𝟬𝟬𝗠, 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 $𝟲𝗕, 𝘁𝗼 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗔𝗜 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗻𝘀 AI startup OpenEvidence secured $𝟮𝟬𝟬𝗠 in Series C funding led by Google Ventures, just 3 months after its $210M Series B, bringing its valuation to $6B. The company has raised nearly $500M since its founding in 2022. OpenEvidence developed an AI-powered medical search engine and generative chatbot built exclusively for physicians. The platform summarizes and ranks evidence-based medical information from trusted sources like the American Medical Association and The New England Journal of Medicine, helping doctors access reliable research in seconds. Usage among US clinicians has surged 830% over the past year, supporting more than 16M clinical consultations per month across 10,000 hospitals and medical centers. The new funding will expand its AI research in natural language processing and computer vision, supporting development of advanced tools like DeepConsult, which generates PhD-level research summaries for doctors. The company aims to make evidence-based care faster, easier, and more accessible for clinicians nationwide.

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🧬 This week’s Austin Bio & Health Roundup has funding, recognition, regional momentum, & new PitchBook healthtech data giving us a peek under the hood of the sector. 🧬 💰 Funding & Capital Signals Hello Patient, a conversational AI platform for clinics, closed a $22.5M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners and included participation from Austin-based 8VC, who also joined their seed round. You need to check out their announcement video. Alex is in top form! 🚀 Launches, Expansions, Milestones, and Wins A second piece of Hello Patient news. They launched their platform into veterinary practices as well. 📊 Data PitchBook published an Emerging Tech Research report on Healthtech VC Trends. In 1H 2025, healthtech startups raised $8B, putting it on pace to beat 2023 and 2024 and possibly 2022. Exits are at $4.9B, suggesting this could be the highest year since 2021. Top 5 subsectors over the last 12 months: • Telehealth: $3.2B over 174 deals • EHRs & Clinical Information and Analytics: $2.2B over 76 deals • Care Management: $2.2B over 113 deals • Operations: $1.7B over 84 deals • Analytics: $1.4B over 104 deals 🏆 Recognition Phantom Neuro featured in "25 Healthcare Devices I Fell in Love With" on David Shulkin’s blog. Shulkin is the former U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs. 🤠 Texas Bio Triangle Houston: The Rice Biotech Launch Pad announced another investment, this time from Houston-based Carnrite Ventures. Houston funding Houston! What’s Next? 🤠 🚀 🦾 🧬

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One of things DCVC looks for in iTechBio companies: early commercial progress, worth billions, from biopharma partners. It’s one of the reasons we invested in Proxima.

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After more than two decades of investing in healthcare, I've learned three things: be patient, resist trend-chasing, and wait until timing makes sense. With experience on dozens of boards, witnessing thousands of pitches, navigating frothy portfolio activity, and surviving the dud markets while waiting on good ones to return, I know that time and timing is key for success in healthcare investing. The challenge is, how do I convince LPs that the wait will be worth it? Peek at Relentless Venture Fund diversity of companies that span regenerative medicine to software-as-a-medical-device (SaMD), includes a repeat entrepreneur who practiced medicine, to technical founders who figured out IP rights in a way that only newbies to the industry would contemplate. The beauty of diversified portfolio construction, regulatory and risk balance. Deep bets take time. That's the opportunity in healthcare investing. BC has structural advantages that make deep bets work. World-class science from The University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, University of Victoria, BCCA and our research hospitals. Clinical trial facilities such as the new Phase 1 Clinical Trial Unit at Providence Health Care. Provincial commitment to the innovation ecosystem such as the government's participation in Aspect Biosystems' $200M, multi-year project to ensure a world class team thrives in a world class facility in our province. What would further amplify our potential? Procurement strategies that let BC companies prove themselves locally before going global. As a member of DIGITAL's investment committee, I evaluate and advance private/public partnerships that derisk technology and accelerate commercial adoption in BC and across Canada. These collaborations are shortening the path from lab to market. Timelines for liquidity in healthcare may be longer than other venture sectors, but the wins are foreshadowed years ahead. Canary Medical Inc. locked in a commercial partnership with Zimmer Biomet before regulatory approval. Aspect secured a $2.6B partnership with Novo Nordisk on pre-clinical data. Two BC founded, Relentless portfolio companies. It will be approximately one decade from our original investment in Aspect to their first human clinical trial. I am not fussed by the timeline. Each strategic partnership and validation of data by customers sets the stage for a high value exit. The beauty of investing in healthcare innovation is regulatory timelines are getting shorter and costs are dropping; innovation is expediting discovery, diagnosis, treatment and care options never imagined when I started my VC career. I know deep science takes time, and patient capital wins. And when they do, BC has an opportunity to capture value that historically flowed south. With the right policy support and patient capital aligned, we can continue to build category defining healthcare companies that scale from our province, not just launch here and relocate. Life Sciences BC

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1 Comment

Search Engines and LLMs have value because they are the origin point of the query. If you don’t have to manually enter the query though typing or voice the starting line for who gets to keep the finders fee moves. First to consciencess thought and eventually to subconscious preawareness. All queries are a cry for help to reduce “suffering”, an attempt to augment our domain over reality QUICKER. First principles: recognition and context in brains and AIs always precedes query.

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