Marta Bralic Kerns

I just read this compelling Forbes piece on how femtech startups are increasingly turning to strategic partnerships to overcome headwinds like limited funding, clinical and regulatory complexity, and go-to-market constraints. Thank you, Theresa Neil for writing it! Some takeaways that resonated with me: -Partnerships can unlock resources and credibility. Collaborating with established institutions, payers, insurers, or healthcare systems provides not just capital but validation, access, and trust. -Risk sharing matters. For many investors, women’s health is still seen as high risk. Joint ventures or co-development deals can distribute that risk and make investment more attractive. -Aligned incentives win. The most successful partnerships are ones where all parties benefit—patient outcomes, cost savings, reputation, and market reach. Data & outcomes are key. To scale, femtechs must shift from promise to proof: demonstrable results, real-world evidence, and strong metrics. If the women’s health / femtech sector is going to break through the ceiling, we need more of these bridge-building partnerships—between startups, payers, tech platforms, providers, and public health. A few questions I’m reflecting on (and would love your feedback): 1. What partnership models have you seen work in medtech / healthtech / femtech? 2. How do we encourage more institutional investors to commit capital to women’s health? 3. What role should government, non-profit, or philanthropic funding play in de-risking these ventures? If you’re actively working in femtech, women’s health, or health innovation, I’d love to hear your thoughts or examples. Let’s keep pushing this frontier together.

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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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I’m excited to share that Angle Health, founded by former Palantir Technologies execs Tylon (Ty) W. and Anirban Gangopadhyay, has announced an oversubscribed Series B bringing total funding to nearly $200M. I’m proud to be an early investor and to have led this competitive round with the amazing team at Portage. Why we keep leaning in: - 26x revenue growth since the Series A - Serving 3,000+ employers across 44 states - 80%+ renewal rates Angle Health is rebuilding the healthcare benefits infrastructure for SMBs, who employ nearly half of America’s workforce but have historically been shut out of enterprise-grade coverage. Their AI-native platform helps predict risk and deliver better care at a sustainable cost. This is exactly the kind of product-driven, AI-native company we’re proud to support at Mighty Capital.

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NYU Langone Health’s informatics leaders recently predicted fully autonomous clinical AI within 5 years with no physician sign-off. Algorithms titrating blood pressure meds, retinopathy screening running end-to-end without a clinician in sight. Their reasoning is hard to argue with as we're facing a shortage of 85,000+ physicians by 2036 and the current care model doesn't have an answer for that, and it seems clear that AI will be playing more of role in providing care going forward. But the next question is more difficult to answer: Are we automating the right things, for the right reasons?   Utah is already stress-testing this with Doctronic by automating routine prescription renewals for chronic condition patients. I wrote about this a month ago - renewals are repetitive, pulling clinicians away from patients who need actual judgment and create gaps in care when they fall through the cracks. If that pilot scales, it frees up real capacity. What makes it work is that prescription renewals are largely protocol-driven. The decision tree is narrow, the inputs are structured, and removing friction there doesn't mean removing judgment from care. Clay Christensen would have called these protocol-driven care pathways 'precision medicine,' having advanced originally from the primordial soup of 'intuitive medicine,' to the mid-stage 'empirical medicine,' to finally precision status. We're seeing the same logic play out across our portfolio companies. Janie automates the administrative workflows that quietly drain clinical capacity, things like billing, prior auth, and care coordination, giving practices back time that should never have been spent on paperwork. FlyteHealth takes a similar approach on the clinical side, combining a multidisciplinary care team with technology to manage obesity, hypertension, and diabetes at scale. The care team stays central and the automation handles everything that doesn't require them. That's the model I find most compelling. Where I get more cautious is with patients who have multiple conditions, polypharmacy risk, or subtle behavioral changes that don’t show up in structured data. A system that's right 95% of the time still needs airtight guardrails for the other 5%, and building those guardrails well requires people who understand what failure looks like. Here's the thing: AI IS NOT GENERALLY INTELLIGENT, AND WE CAN RELY ON IT TO FAIL AT 'LAST MILE' JUDGMENT WORK THAT REQUIRES GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. The goal here shouldn't be to remove humans from care. It should be to stop wasting clinical talent on work that doesn't require it. As routine tasks get automated, clinicians should have more room for nuanced conversation, the shared decision, the patient who needs persuasion as much as a prescription. Utah and NYU deserve real credit for running these experiments in the open.

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“This is validation for the movement we’re leading to provide women better healthcare,” - Joanna Strober, co-founder and chief executive of Midi Health. Women's telehealth company Midi Health has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round, valuing the women’s telehealth company at more than $1 billion and cementing its status as a unicorn. The round was led by Goodwater Capital, with new backing from Foresite Capital and Serena Ventures, alongside existing investors including GV (Google Ventures), @Emerson Collective, McKesson Ventures, Felicis Ventures, AVP | Advance Venture Partners and SemperVirens VC. The funding marks one of the largest recent raises in women’s digital health. https://lnkd.in/eiUaVJai

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Very pleased to have Victorine Lançon Lancon joining us at the HealthVC Summit for our panel, Women’s Health: The Next Frontier for Private Capital. One of the biggest challenges in women’s health is not just building better companies, but making sure the opportunity is communicated in a way that investors understand and can underwrite. Victorine brings a valuable perspective across strategy, storytelling and capital, working both inside a femtech venture studio and through One of the Girls Has Money Now to help close the funding gap in women’s health. That combination of product, narrative and investor thinking should make for a very strong discussion on what it will actually take to attract more private capital into the sector. Looking forward to welcoming Victorine to Zurich on September 3rd. #HealthVCSummit #WomensHealth #Femtech #VentureCapital #HealthTech #HealthcareInvestment #Zurich

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At Bread and Butter Ventures, we're in our 7th year of investing in digital health. I've been hearing a lot of feedback lately from both funds and founders alike that VC funding for tech-enabled care delivery is fewer and far between these days. I'm super bullish on tech-enabled care as a component of a digital health portfolio because I believe that true, lasting innovation will be driven by bottoms-up early stage innovation responding to top-down industry pain points, and that to innovate we must have distribution through the incumbent plumbing of the healthcare system - and that includes care at the center. Yes, the margins are lower than pure software, but the distribution network of healthcare is very different than pure B2B. We're super interested right now in: ✅ Applications of AI to in infrastructure and operations of health care systems, provider networks, health plans to reduce manual work and enable everyone to operate at their best and highest use ✅ Applications of AI to clinical decision support and ultimately care delivery ✅ Solutions that address population health and help with access to care in both rural and urban settings (both from a care & cost perpspective), cardiometabolic health, women's health (still wildly uninvested opportunities to serve half the population), eldercare ✅ Insurtech, fintech and the payments layer of healthcare We would love to connect with more co-investors at all stages (pre-seed, seed, later stage) who are actively investing in digital health and specifically at tech-enabled care solutions to drive the next generation of healthcare innovation. Please DM us or tag a firm/investor here!

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