Lon Chow

I spoke with Christien Louviere of BDE Capital about his journey from a $330mm exit to becoming an independent sponsor. Christien shared excellent insights for folks looking to partner with business owners, rather than buy sellers out completely. Below are a few of the topics we covered: - Why he moved from “zero-to-one” startups to a buy-then-build strategy - How Christien's background shaped a focus on growth vs. cost-cutting - Why 20–40% rolled equity is central to his deal structures—and how it builds trust with sellers - Using scenario analysis with AI tools to evaluate management teams and uncover hidden key-person risks - How to identify when a $3–5M EBITDA company truly has a middle management layer—or is still founder-reliant For anyone investing in or buying small businesses, Christien’s approach provides a fresh lens on growth, alignment, and deal structuring. 🎥 Watch the full interview here → https://lnkd.in/ekfkaiej 🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/e86Agx6V

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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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Barti Software, provider of an eye-care software platform, raised $12m in Series A funding. The round was led by Five Elms Capital with participation from Vertical Venture Partners, Zag Capital, and Bienville Capital Partners LP. Led by Kelly Cai, OD, COO, and Colton Calandrella, CEO, Barti provides AI-powered EHR and practice management software for eye care providers to streamline workflows, cut clicks, and improve patient care. Functionalities include an AI Scribe tailored for eye care, a native phone/VoiP system, and website management. https://lnkd.in/dDGbvX-E

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Scaling your VC-backed startup? You may be missing critical financial expertise. While you focus on growth, the complexities of venture capital funding - cap table management, investor due diligence, financial forecasting - can derail promising startups. Most founders lack the deep financial knowledge needed to manage these challenges. The solution? Strategic fractional CFO support. Learn when and why to bring in fractional CFO expertise for sustainable scaling: https://lnkd.in/g8mXyMRH #VentureCapital #Startups #FractionalCFO

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Proud to share that Greenfield Partners has led GoodShip’s $25M Series B, combining forces with our friends at Bessemer Venture Partners, Ironspring Ventures, Chicago Ventures, and FUSE! For anyone who has managed freight, the pain is familiar: scattered data, reactive decisions, and too many spreadsheets. GoodShip is building a modern operating system that brings planning, procurement, and performance into one place so transportation teams can act faster with measurable results. By unifying data across systems, teams get real-time visibility and clearer levers. GoodShip is already trusted by the leading enterprise shippers like Tropicana, WK Kellogg, McCain Foods, and KBX Logistics. “The freight industry is moving toward a new operating standard, with GoodShip at the forefront of this shift” says Itay Inbar. “GoodShip is redefining a trillion-dollar industry with a novel approach and rapid AI innovation - unifying procurement and visibility in a platform that’s already proving its value at enterprise scale across the world’s largest shippers.” The team, led by Ryan Soskin and David Tsai, brings deep freight experience and a builder’s mindset, and it shows in every customer conversation. Already, we are hard at work with the GoodShip team in scaling their go-to-market. Our shared goal is straightforward: help more shippers move from reactive decision-making to confident execution. This is the start of an exciting journey ahead. Congratulations to Ryan, David, and the entire GoodShip team—I’m grateful for the partnership and energized for what comes next! Itay Inbar Olivia Levine

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💲 Emergent announced $23 million in Series A funding to empower more people to build and run businesses simply The round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from YC, Together, Prosus Ventures and angels including Jeff Dean, Devendra Chaplot, Balaji Srinivasan and brings Emergent’s total funding to $30 million, including a $7 million seed round. “My brother and I built Emergent to equip anyone with an idea and a phone with the tools to create software affordably,” said Mukund Jha, Co-Founder and CEO. 📖 Find out more here: https://lnkd.in/e-fPZh-w #StartupsMagazine #Startups #Entrepreneur #Funding

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At Venture Investors Health Fund we have experienced the impact that funds of funds (FoF) can have on capital availability. Our first experience was with the Venture Michigan Funds, two state sponsored funds of $95M and $120M. That’s big enough to make a large enough commitment to justify opening an office in the state (at least $15M). The idea was to attract experienced firms from out of state and their syndication networks. The commitment couldn’t be more than 25% of a fund and the funds had to invest at least that amount in Michigan. It worked. They stopped collecting data in 2018, but by that time, the funds had invested $264M in 56 Michigan companies. Through syndication, total invested was $1.71B (6.45x). VMF 1 returned 1x by 2018, and VMF 2 was 3x. Annual economic impact had grown to $303M. That data was before HistoSonics, Inc. got FDA approval triggering its meteoric rise. The company may have never gotten off the ground without VMF. Series A had 5 funds, 4 from Michigan, 3 of which opened a MI office because of VMF. Badger Fund is also State funded, but the first fund was only $25M, so they pursued a different strategy of helping launch first time funds, resulting in new funds across the state. We need that too, and it has impacted the number of funds and companies able to get VC backing. NVNG Investment Advisors, LLC is a private effort targeting corporate investors. We need more participants in the asset class, but small institutions and companies can’t always make the scale of investment to get diversification or hire the in house expertise for fund selection. A FoF like NVNG provides that. All different, all playing important roles. To be an Exempt Reporting Advisor, 80% of investments need to be directly into companies, precluding FoFs. The DEAL Act would lower the threshold to 50%, so a FoF that did 50% direct co-invest could qualify, lowering the barrier to formation. Ask Congress to make that happen.

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Medallion has raised $43M in new funding led by Acrew Capital with participation from Washington Harbour Partners LP, Sequoia Capital, GV (Google Ventures), Spark Capital, NFDG, and others, bringing total funding to $130M. Founded by Derek Lo, Medallion is transforming healthcare back-office operations with AI-powered automation, now supporting ~1M providers. The funding also launches CredAlliance, the first national credentialing clearinghouse, streamlining verification across payer networks. Vishal Lugani of Acrew Capital praised Medallion’s execution and impact as it scales nationwide. https://lnkd.in/ezmFPaMp #AI #Healthcare #HealthTech #Automation #Funding #Credentialing #Innovation Lauren Mitri Abalos

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Popai Health was built on a crucial yet simple idea: phone calls between patients and care teams hold critical insights, but most of that data is lost once the call ends. Every day, millions of patient conversations take place - rich with clinical, operational, and behavioral signals - yet that data often isn't captured. Popai captures and transforms this unstructured voice data into real-time intelligence, powering automation, risk detection, and workflow optimization across care management. In my latest blog post, I share why we helped build Popai and why we believe voice is the next strategic frontier in healthcare infrastructure — a new data layer that connects the human element of care with the intelligence layer of AI. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dNWppJ5M

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Administrative inefficiencies add up fast in healthcare. These lead to missed appointments, manual coding, and bottlenecks that overburden operational staff. Before we implemented these technologies our partners manual processes meant: -Scheduling errors -Heavy coding overhead -Staff frustration After we partnered with these imaging centers to deploy our proprietary technologies, in just 30 days, they saw: +15.8 % calls per hour +15.7 % appointments per hour and 25% less no-shows. At CCD Health, we believe AI-enabled care can rewrite this story and give managers hours back each week, helping identify the right care protocols (CPT codes) faster and predicting and preventing no-shows. This is what AI + ML + empathy looks like in practice. Because AI scheduling is not about replacing people. It’s about returning time and empathy to healthcare. Explore how these technologies can also power sustainable growth for your Healthcare Organization.

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