The U.S. does a terrible job managing chronic disease, and the data proves it. The country spends more on healthcare than any other nation, yet fewer than 30% of U.S. adults with high blood pressure ever get it under control. Meanwhile, fewer than 10% of heart failure patients are on the right medications at any given time.
Cadence, a startup seeking to automate its way out of that crisis, raised $100 million in Series C funding on Tuesday. The round, led by Spark Capital, brings the New York-based company’s fundraising total to $241 million.
Other participants in the Series C round included Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Coatue and B Capital, as well as the venture capital arms at three health systems: Corewell Health, Memorial Hermann and Duke Health.
Cadence CEO Chris Altchek founded the company in 2020 based on the thesis that the treatment of heart failure, hypertension and diabetes could be automated away from the clinic and into the home.
“The model for treating chronic disease in this country is broken. Taking care of patients in a couple clinic visits every time they come and see their [primary care provider] a couple times a year doesn’t work — and at Cadence, we flip the model,” Altchek remarked.
The startup flips that model by sending patients home with connected devices, continuously monitoring their vitals and adjusting their medications in real time. Its platform also uses AI to predict events like strokes and heart attacks before they happen.
Altchek noted that Cadence isn’t a monitoring platform, but rather a clinical service. The company operates a medical group with more than 300 staff members, including physicians, nurses and nurse practitioners.
This clinical team gets white-labeled under Cadence’s health system partners, and then they care for patients “24 hours a day, seven days a week, under the clinical protocols and brand of the health system,” Altchek explained.
Other than the health systems investing in the company, some of Cadence’s other health system customers include Providence, Yale New Haven Health, Hackensack Meridian Health, Lifepoint Health, Community Health Systems, Hartford HealthCare and Rush University System for Health. Cadence cares for more than 100,000 patients across these health system partners, Altchek noted.
The startup has also attracted a striking set of investors, now having reached a valuation of $1.23 billion. Thrive Capital, an early backer of OpenAI, led Cadence’s Series A round, and Spark Capital, among the earliest investors in Anthropic, led this most recent funding round. Altchek sees that as a sign that the sharpest AI investors in the world believe chronic care is where AI might have its biggest real-world impact.
“There’s a lot of talk about AI replacing jobs. What’s important is how AI is actually going to make people healthier — and we’re an example of that actually happening now,” he declared.
Photo: Trevor Williams, Getty Images
