Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices…
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Paul Johnson Contributor Paul Johnson is the CEO and co-founder of Redirect Health, a company that makes healthcare work end to end using technology and a passion for care. More posts by this contributor Moore’s Law And The 30-Year Rule Far too often, we see medical mixups and even deaths caused by interoperability obstacles in…
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Abhinav Shashank Contributor Innovaccer founder and CEO Abhinav Shashank has written more than 300 articles for various international media outlets and has also been listed in Forbes’ “30 Under 30 Asia 2017: Enterprise Tech” and among the “Top 60 rising leaders in U.S. healthcare under 40” in the 2019 Becker’s Hospital Review. Mike Sutten Contributor…
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The digital health space continues cooking on gas: Berlin-based Ada Health has closed a $90M Series B round of funding led by Leaps by Bayer, the impact investment arm of the German multinational pharma giant, Bayer AG. Other investors in the round include Samsung Catalyst Fund, Vitruvian Partners, Inteligo Bank, F4 and Mutschler Ventures. The…
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It’s hard enough to talk about your feelings to a person; Jo Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Wysa, is hoping you’ll find it easier to confide in a robot. Or, put more specifically, “emotionally intelligent” artificial intelligence. Wysa is an AI-powered mental health app designed by Touchkin eServices, Aggarwal’s company that currently maintains headquarters…
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Telemedicine, in its original form of the phone call, has been around for decades. For people in remote or rural areas without easy access to in-person care, consulting a doctor over the phone has often been the go-to approach. But for a large swath of the world used to taking half a day off work…
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Swedish digital health startup Kry, which offers a telehealth service (and software tools) to connect clinicians with patients for remote consultations, last raised just before the pandemic hit in Western Europe, netting a €140M Series C in January 2020. Today it’s announcing an oversubscribed sequel: The Series D raise clocks in at $312M (€262M) and…
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Being an expectant mom can be frightening, as can mothering an infant or toddler. The answers don’t come automatically, and while there’s no shortage of books and websites (and advice from grandparents) about how to parent at every stage, finding satisfying information often proves a lot harder than imagined. There are online social groups that…
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French startup Alan has raised a $220 million funding round at a $1.67 billion valuation (€185 million and €1.4 billion respectively). Coatue is leading the round with Dragoneer, Exor, and existing investors Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Temasek also participating. Alan has been building health insurance products from scratch. When I first covered the company…
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If you think cyberattacks are scary, what if those attacks were directed at your cardiac pacemaker? Medtronic, a medical device company, has been in hot water over the last couple of years because its pacemakers were getting hacked through their internet-based software updating systems. But in a new partnership with Sternum, an IoT cybersecurity startup…
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