Healthleap, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to scan patient records and identify undiagnosed illnesses, has secured $38 million in combined seed and Series A funding, TechCrunch exclusively reported on October 7. The financing includes an $8 million seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, plus a $30 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures. Founded in South Africa in 2022 by siblings Jemima and Josiah Meyer, the company built a platform designed to catch conditions like malnutrition and delirium that hospitals frequently miss in their early stages.
The platform now operates in more than 50 hospitals, where it screens patients for malnutrition and delirium, according to CEO Josiah Meyer. Over the past year, Healthleap grew from three hospital partners to over 50, and revenue jumped more than tenfold during the same period, though the company didn't share exact figures. Its customer base now includes Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist, and Emory Healthcare. At the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Healthleap's malnutrition program generated $23.8 million in annualized financial impact—$6.3 million from additional reimbursement and $17.5 million from reduced hospital stays. The startup sells three-year contracts based on a hospital's licensed bed count and uses outcome-based pricing, with every customer seeing at least a 5x return on investment and some achieving over 20x annual total ROI.
Healthleap connects to a hospital's electronic health record system and uses language models to extract information from clinicians' written notes—details like recent weight loss, poor appetite, muscle loss, or trouble swallowing, Meyer explained. "Each night, we analyze every adult inpatient's record: lab results, vital signs, weights, medications, diet orders, diagnoses, clinicians' notes, and more," he said. "Each morning, we write a risk score into the care team's existing workflow with a dashboard accessible that holds additional information about the patients' trends." The company notes its software doesn't diagnose patients—it only flags items for further review. Healthleap has also developed programs to identify aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers, and congestive heart failure readmission risk, which are currently undergoing additional clinical validation.
Malnutrition provided a strategic entry point for the platform because it's both widespread and frequently overlooked, with serious consequences for patient outcomes. Research indicates 20% to 50% of hospital inpatients suffer from malnutrition, and studies have connected it to longer hospital stays, impaired wound healing, infections, complications, and higher rates of death and illness, according to the report. The company's approach pulls both structured data—lab reports, vitals—and unstructured notes that Meyer described as holding "the most telling signs" of a patient's condition. By feeding both types of information into its risk models, the platform surfaces patients who might otherwise slip through the cracks during busy hospital workflows.
Healthleap plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering, product, sales, and customer success teams as it adds support for identifying additional conditions. Meyer said the company ultimately aims to cover more than 40 major health conditions and move beyond hospitals into outpatient and home care settings. The startup contractually guarantees hospitals will receive multiples of the contract price in measurable ROI, using hard financial validation from each hospital's finance team. For healthcare systems struggling to balance quality and cost, platforms that can spot high-risk patients before complications set in represent a shift from reactive treatment to proactive intervention. Whether the technology can scale across dozens of conditions while maintaining accuracy and physician trust will determine if this approach reshapes how hospitals allocate their limited clinical attention.