Breakdown of VC Investment Into Health Startups in 2023

Breakdown of VC Investment Into Health Startups in 2023

Author

Peter Walker

|

Read time: 

2 minutes

Published date: 

January 16, 2024

About 26% of US Carta startup capital in 2023 went to health sectors—biotech took over half, healthtech grew, and medical devices received a smaller but...

LinkedIn: Breakdown of VC Investment Into Health Startups in 2023

Breakdown: VC investment into health startups in 2023

About 26% of VC capital raised by US Carta startups last year went to health-related sectors.

Obviously there are a hundred different ways to categorize those companies, but we broke it out into three major pieces: Biotech, Healthtech, and Medical Devices.

𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗣𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘀

  • Biotech took in more than half of all health-related investment last year (across the top 10 metros). This is a major shift from 2019, when Biotech was only 35% of Health more broadly.

  • Health seems to be a pretty concentrated slice of VC - these top 10 metros accounted for 80% of all Health investment in the US.

  • Two ecosystems (Boston and San Diego) are anchored by Biotech to a very large degree. In San Diego, Biotech represents nearly half of every VC dollar raised across all industries.

  • Biotech is typically a more capital-intensive sector, where early-stage rounds are larger than in Healthtech in particular.

  • Medical Device startups lagged behind both other categories in terms of funding, valuation, and general activity last year.

Really fascinated by the shift towards Biotech in general - I'm assuming that is primarily due to Covid and the increased awareness of the potential in new drugs/therapies. But would love to know if there are other reasons why investors have favored that part of the health market in recent years.

Within Healthtech, last year saw a drop in funding for new healthcare provider startups and a relative increase in share of funding for telehealth. May just be a noisy artifact from a down year, however.

Investment into health seems to have held steady across out data at about a quarter of all VC investment over the pat 5 years. Wouldn't mind seeing that rise in 2024!

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#cartadata #startups #fundraising #biotech #healthtech #medicaldevices

Peter Walker
Author: Peter Walker
Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project.

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