Portfolio News

Seattle teen entrepreneurs sell their health-tech startup and take a break from college

In March 2020, Seattle teens Sage Khanuja, 17, and Nikolas Ioannou, 18, launched an SMS COVID-19 tracker called Spira. The text-based service originally sent out daily updates on coronavirus pulled from Worldometer, as well as reminders for hand washing and staying home. But it quickly grew into a COVID-19 screening tool that used a phone’s microphone to conduct a cough and auscultation test. Today, Spira is much broader than just COVID-19—it uses machine learning algorithms to create digital smart forms to enhance patient screening and adapt...

Three Challenges You Should Overcome to Restore Growth

According to a recent survey, most small businesses believe that 2021 will be a “positive” or “very positive” year for their businesses. In a recent panel discussion on The Future of Business: Gearing for Growth, Ramon Ray and several panelists discussed the challenges businesses will need to overcome to be successful. One potential pitfall businesses could run into is failing to recognize that 2020 changed the economy and consumer behavior. Updating sales and marketing strategies for the post-COVID world will be critical to success, with panelists...

Leadership Edge with Andrew Dudum, Co-Founder and CEO of Hims & Hers: A Modern Approach to Health and Wellness

Andrew Dudum is more than just the co-founder and CEO of Hims & Hers. He is also an active angel investor and advisor to more than two dozen startups. In a recent interview with Thrive Global, Dudum talked about his past career, what makes Hims & Hers unique, and what the future of health looks like. “I’ve been building companies for about 15 years now,” Dudum said. “It started when I was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania at The Wharton School, where I spent...

9 healthcare outfits named among Forbes’s ‘top AI companies to watch’ in 2021

Forbes has released its third annual AI 50, a list of private, promising North American companies that are using artificial intelligence in ways that are fundamental to their operations, and McKesson Ventures portfolio company Komodo Health is among them. To be considered, companies must be privately held and using machine learning (where systems learn from data to improve on tasks), natural language processing (which enables programs to “understand” written or spoken language), or computer vision (which relates to how machines “see”). AI companies incubated at, largely...

How Top Health Systems are Scaling COVID-19 Vaccine Scheduling with Kyruus

Kyruus Chief Technology Officer Chris Gervais recently wrote on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog about how Kyruus has been able to help health systems scale COVID-19 vaccination scheduling thanks to Kyruus and AWS technology. Knowing they needed a way to handle the increasing demand for vaccinations while maintaining access to other services, the majority of Kyruus’ customers turned to technology. Two things were clear: they needed a solution that was intuitive and consumer-friendly, and they needed a solution and vendor relationship that could scale with...