Greg Knox

Surviving and Thriving in HealthTech Fundraising: What’s Actually Working The fundraising landscape for early-stage HealthTech has changed. The speculative bets of the last cycle have given way to a market that rewards disciplined execution, real traction, and AI-powered operational change. Gone are the days when a slick deck and a big vision could carry you through. Today, investors are asking tougher questions: Can you prove operational efficiency? Is your AI more than a buzzword? Are you solving real pain points inside the healthcare system? Here’s what I’m seeing: ⚪ Valuations are rationalizing. AI-native startups get the premium, but only if the tech is built into the core, not slapped on top. (Agentic AI automating scheduling, billing, or coding, not just a chatbot.) ⚪ Bridge rounds are the new normal. Many teams are raising extensions to buy time and hit the revenue milestones required for a real Series A. ⚪ Provider operations are hot. “Tourist” capital is gone. The money is following solutions that automate the hard, unglamorous work: scheduling, billing, and compliance, not the next wellness app. ⚪ Experience matters more than ever. Serial founders and clinician-led teams are getting funded. First-timers face a steeper climb. ⚪ Diversity remains a challenge. Funding for female-only teams is still far too low(<3%), despite strong exit performance (24% of US VC exits). If you’re raising now, a few recommendations: 🌟 Show, don’t just tell. Investors want to see working pilots, early revenue, and clear operational metrics. 🌟 Build for integration, not isolation. AI agents that can plug into legacy systems (Epic, Cerner, or provider workflows) will stand out in 2026 and beyond. 🌟 Don’t wait for market perfection. SAFE rounds and internal bridges are tools, not signals of failure. Use them to keep moving and compound learning. 🌟 Prioritize trust. Compliance, security, and clinical rigor are now baseline expectations, not differentiators. The question is not whether capital is available. The question is whether you’re building for this new era; disciplined, AI-native, and ready to scale with trust. I built an in-depth report on these fundraising trends from 2024-2025. Comment below and I'll send you a copy.

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SaaS companies should be sounding 5 alarm fires right now. 🚨 The future is here. It arrived about 30 days ago and we're never going back. I'm not sure anyone should sign up with a new SaaS product. Just build what you need. Operationally it will be challenging for big companies to navigate off of SaaS products which run their business but it's going to start happening. It should happen faster. Many companies are already late to the party. They're being too cautious. They move should faster. This is one of those times. What Block did sucks - but you have to do it as a SaaS company. The only way they survive is massively cutting costs (and price). Block probably didn't cut deep enough at 40%. They probably need to do another round of cuts before the year is out. 2026 is going to be a wild ride for SaaS companies. Probably not a fun one.

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Attention isn’t all you need with telemedicine. You need trust. For five years, DTC telehealth grew on a simple loop: buy attention, convert with convenience, lock in with subscriptions. It worked, until it didn’t. Cerebral drew a DOJ probe over controlled-substance prescribing and later agreed to a non-prosecution resolution with payments totaling roughly $3.65M+. The same company disclosed in 2023 that ~3.1M users had data sent to advertisers via tracking pixel. The FTC also penalized GoodRx ($1.5M) and BetterHelp ($7.8M) for sharing sensitive data with advertisers. 💉🩸Then came GLP-1s. During shortages, many clinics offered compounded semaglutide at roughly $150–$400/month far cheaper than brands but not FDA-approved. Independent testing and FDA/Novo warnings flagged potency and impurity issues, including cases with no active ingredient or salt forms not used in approved drugs. By Feb 21, 2025, FDA declared the semaglutide shortage resolved and set wind-down deadlines; mass compounding largely ended. Meanwhile, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly and Company escalated enforcement against copycats. You can see the pivot: 1️⃣ Ro × Lilly to deliver on-label Zepbound vials via LillyDirect (authentic supply, clear pricing paths). 2️⃣ Calibrate leaning into FDA-approved meds, outcomes, and payer/employer integrations ... not short-cuts. We don't need louder ads, we need a sturdier trust stack: transparent pricing and data practices, real clinical protocols and follow-up, and proof that outcomes improve. Industry needs to act less like an ad network, more like healthcare.

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The biggest sales leadership hiring mistake in healthtech right now? Recruiting a closer when you need a builder. I talk to digital health founders and CEOs every week who need a VP of Sales or CRO yesterday. Pipeline is stalling, the board wants ARR growth, and the pressure is real. So the instinct kicks in: "Find me a sales leader from a big healthtech company who's carried a number and hit it." But here's what I've learned from executive sales leaders across healthtech and digital health companies: Selling into health systems, payers, and provider organizations is a completely different game — and the leader you need depends entirely on where you are as a company. A CRO who scaled revenue at a mature healthtech platform with an established brand, inbound pipeline, and a 20-person sales team may completely stall at your Series B where they need to personally run demos, navigate 12-month procurement cycles, and build relationships with CMIOs and VPs of Population Health from scratch. And a VP of Sales who crushed it in enterprise SaaS but has never dealt with value analysis committees, clinical validation requirements, or the reality that your champion just got pulled into a 9-hour shift? That's a costly experiment. In healthtech sales, context matters more than quota attainment history. Three things I'd encourage every founder and board to ask before hiring a sales leader: → Has this person sold into the specific buyer persona we're targeting — health systems, payers, employers, or provider groups? → Have they built a sales motion from scratch, or only inherited one? → Can they translate clinical value into business outcomes in a room full of skeptical hospital administrators? The right sales leader doesn't just close deals. In healthtech, they become the bridge between your product's clinical promise and the revenue that funds it. If you're hiring a sales leader for a digital health or healthtech company and want a thought partner — my DMs are open. #HealthTech #DigitalHealth #SalesLeadership #ExecutiveSearch #CRO #HealthcareIT #HiringStrategy

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