Despite post-pandemic inactivity, the healthcare startup world is heating up—with a smaller yet more quality pool of innovative early-stage companies. Whether that is Aiolos Bio’s asthma drug or Hippocratic AI’s LLM aimed at explaining healthcare use cases like dietary advice and medication reminders, healthcare technology is the future. 

This has compelled me to seek out and screen HealthTechs for our venture partner, focusing on software & AI data labeling last December. Our Moso Deal Team led by Nae Nae Chairatchaneeboon (MD) is proud to share that we have sourced and conducted diligence on Elythea, resulting in an investment by our venture partner in the startup’s $1.5M seed round. 

Backed by Y-Accelerator, Kleiner Perkins Fairchild Fund, Johnson and Johnson Impact Ventures, MIT Solve. An impressive strategic investor roster. However, Elythea’s value was beyond these backers: I knew that Elythea was special as I hopped on my first call with Reetam Ganguli, Elythea’s founder. Passionate, talented, and cautious: three words to describe him. Reetam was accepted into Brown’s accelerated medical school program at 17. His specific research emphasis was developing ML/DL models to detect hard-to-predict outcomes in women's health—from recurrent cancer to postoperative mortality. Prior to Elythea, Reetam founded a global biology education company and scaled it to 10,000+ students across 30+ countries and special consultative status with the UN.

But it’s not just the talent that drew the team and I to Elythea. Like our partnering investor, we believed that Reetam was “truly building a generational company.”

Why Elythea Will Become Healthcare’s Next Big Platform?

1. Elythea revolutionizes how doctors predict pregnancy complications

Pregnancy complications occur in >40% of pregnancies in 2021. Yet, according to the CDC 80% of these deaths were preventable and 2 in 3 of these complications were preventable with earlier identification and intervention. As an ex-intern who shadowed in the OBGYN department in Vietnam, I knew that existing solutions to predict pregnancy complications at early stages were limited: clinician judgements’ performance vary widely, rubric scoring systems were outdated, and biomarker-based diagnostic tests can only be used in the second trimester and beyond. 

With Elythea ML technology, doctors can predict pregnancy complications (postpartum, hemorrhage, eclampsia, preterm-labor, etc) before they happen, as early as the first visit, and prepare appropriately—based on basic patients’ socioeconomic background. Elythea’s accuracy is based on its algorithm trained on over 14 million patients’ data. 

2. Elythea is not stopping at predictive analytics for pregnancy complications

Beyond Elythea’s $1.3Bn market for pregnancy complications, Reetam is aiming for more: the $110Bn global market opportunity for other chronic diseases such as cardiology, oncology, and diabetes. With Elythea’s existing algorithm and patients’ data, similar predictive analytics can be applied to other diseases not only in the US but also worldwide. In fact, Reetam has brought Elythea to Nigeria and Cameroon where results showed that Elythea’s ML algorithm was not too overfit to American patients and thus its models can be generalized. 

My Key Takeaways as an Investment Analyst?

Be dynamic—not just with my team and partnering investor, but with the startup founder as well. They deserve to be kept in the loop as much as everyone else. Trust, they will appreciate it very much. 

Ask questions—ask anything and everything. Question why things are the way they are and why they are done the way they are done—even if you think you “kinda” know. 

Be skeptical—it’s easy to fall into the “this startup is so cool” hype, making it difficult to identify potential risks. With a lot of Tech-based companies/platforms, I realized that the main risks include: (1) your moat, why can’t another other big companies replicate what you are doing? and (2) sell-cycle, how much do businesses/customers want your service; why should they pay for it?

Be committed, but don't put in your emotions—it’s easy to get attached to a company. I was fortunate enough that this time, the deal went through; however, I know that most of the time, deals do not go through. And that’s okay. 

My deal team and myself are excited to have facilitated an investment between our awesome partnering angel investor and this truly, generational startup. We can’t wait for what the future holds for Elythea and Reetam!