In the past eight years, Redesign Health has evolved into a venture and applied technology firm with a growing global reach—the company launched hubs in Saudi Arabia and India last year, with more to come.
In the time since the company launched in 2018, a pandemic upended healthcare, and rapid advances in artificial intelligence are shaking up the industry in fundamental ways. But Redesign Health, based in New York City, has navigated these shifts and changes with a focus on building next-generation healthcare companies.
Redesign Health has launched more than 60 companies touching the lives of more than 15 million patients, and it's raised more than $1.5 billion from institutional, sovereign and strategic investors—all during a time of volatility in the venture market, massive disruptions to care delivery and shifts in policy. The venture firm banked $175 million in December 2024 to cultivate 20 additional companies that address healthy aging, expanding sites of service and interoperability.
The company has expanded its footprint, grown its portfolio and invested deeply in technology, but its focus remains the same since inception, according to Brett Shaheen, founder and CEO at Redesign Health.
“We’re backing exceptional founders at the earliest stage, oftentimes before their ideas are fully formed, and then leaning in to provide an uncommon degree of strategic leverage and domain expertise through exit,” he told Fierce Healthcare in an interview. “At the same time, we've really doubled down on areas of the business that have proven the most impactful for our founders and that we believe are the most aligned with what we see as the future of healthcare innovation—we've really deepened our connectivity to the industry, we’ve added seven brilliant technologists to our team to support our growing portfolio of AI-native portfolio companies, as well as help lead the AI transformation of Redesign itself.”
The company has eight investing themes it supports across all of its ventures: addressing the healthcare labor shortage, accelerating value-based and longitudinal care, advancing healthcare interoperability, preparing for an aging population, eliminating barriers to health equity, expanding sites of care, growing the insured population and driving healthcare personalization and consumerization.
Its startup portfolio includes Duos, AI-powered tech to support older adults; Harmonic Health, which offers care management for dementia patients; medication management startup Scriptology; metabolic health company Calibrate; Translucent, an “AI financial analyst” for healthcare operators; cancer care navigation company Jasper; and MedArrive, a company that powers healthcare in the home. Redesign Health’s strategy is to launch five or six companies a year.
Partnering with leading healthcare institutions is key to Redesign Health’s business model. It teamed up with Mayo Clinic to hatch Corvus, a startup that streamlines the surgical referral process, and it has launched two companies with UPMC Enterprises: Pip Care, an app that helps prepare patients for surgery, and Glimmer Health, a company that focuses on chronic pain patients.
Redesign also is partnering with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to co-build multiple healthcare companies.
"Our thesis since the beginning has been that impacted scale requires disruption for within," Shaheen said. "We put a lot of time and work into building relationships with institutions like these that enable our founders to work alongside marquee institutions from the earliest days to deeply understand their pain points as organizations, and through that, develop solutions that have a high probability of success and as well as an accelerated path to impact."
Entrepreneurs may have bold ideas to disrupt healthcare from the outside in but they often confront challenges with integration and sales cycles in the healthcare industry. "We're able to cut off a lot of that early risk and help our founders find an accelerated path to market through those partnerships,” Shaheen said.
Two years ago, during a downturn in the U.S. venture market, Redesign Health restructured its operations, cut staff positions and slowed the pace of new company launches. Those changes set the venture firm up to make more targeted investments in growth areas, executives said.
"We have an extremely high bar for the investments that we make, and we look to make a small number of those investments per year, on the order of four to five per market," Shaheen said. "At the same time, we're seeing an unprecedented level of opportunity, as we believe AI has the potential to fundamentally reshape the healthcare industry in the coming years, so we could certainly deploy faster and have in the past, but we're keeping it artificially capped. A core value proposition to our model is our ability to spend enormous time on each investment and provide founders with an uncommon degree of strategic leverage and domain expertise."
International expansion strategy
Redesign Health's ambitions to build next-generation healthcare companies extends beyond the U.S. Early last year, the venture firm unveiled a partnership with Sanabil Investments, a wholly owned company by the Public Investment Fund, to open the Sanabil Venture Studio by Redesign Health in Saudi Arabia. The partnership aims to jointly develop and launch at least 20 healthcare companies in the kingdom.
As part of this strategy, the Saudi government is actively investing in AI technology and infrastructure.
Shortly after, Redesign Health launched its Global Ventures Headquarters in Bengaluru, India, aiming for it to serve as a central hub for its international operations.
"Core to our mission from the beginning is to help people live longer and healthier lives everywhere, and that's necessitates an increasingly global focus over time. We also believe there's an opportunity to increase the leverage we can provide founders as well as deepen our partnerships with healthcare leaders by having a global footprint," Shaheen said. "Our vision is really to be able to learn from how healthcare systems and organizations globally are organized and capture synergies from cross-border flows of talents, of IP, of capital and commercial opportunities."
In the past year, the Riyadh-based venture studio Sanabil Venture Studio has built a bench of venture partners and inked partnerships with leading public and private healthcare institutions, including the Saudi Ministry of Health; Tawuniya, a large insurance player; and healthcare service provider Fakeeh Care Group, according to Shaheen. And the venture studio has backed its first three founders.
"We continue to be impressed by both the quality of talent in Saudi Arabia, as well as how forward leaning and eager to embrace innovation the government and private sector players are there," Shaheen noted.
Redesign Health is seeing strong proof points in Saudi Arabia and India that validate its international strategy, he asserts. "We're now exploring launching a business with a global healthcare company that, for a number of reasons, is most excited to pilot a technical solution in Saudi Arabia before expanding internationally. Having that growing global footprint made us a natural partner for them," he said.
Redesign Health also is creating a blueprint for other venture firms to invest and build startups outside the U.S. market. The company aims to take lessons learned from its work in the U.S. as well as Saudi Arabia and India as it continues to expand to new markets.
Redesign Health is now eyeing Europe, Southeast Asia and other areas of India for its third international market, according to Adam Jones, managing director of global development at Redesign Health.
"We have truly global ambitions. Over a long-time horizon, we have aspirations to expand access to affordable, high-quality care in all major markets," Jones told Fierce Healthcare.
Despite different healthcare delivery and payment systems and government regulations, there are many commonalities across international markets, he noted. Many countries are experiencing demographic shifts toward older populations and rising rates of chronic conditions, which drive greater demand for healthcare services. Healthcare staffing shortages are a widespread challenge as well. The World Health Organization estimates a projected shortfall of 11 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low- and lower-middle income countries.
"In most major markets, you're seeing the price of healthcare outstrip GDP and that creates tremendous opportunities to add value through the application of new technologies," Jones said. "In terms of lessons learned that are universal, governments, healthcare partners and investors are increasingly aligning on some of the toughest challenges facing healthcare. This is probably one of the most exciting times in history to be building healthcare companies to address these challenges."
Redesign Health's model was developed to be highly flexible across different geographies, he attests.
"When you boil it down into the most essential elements, what we're doing ultimately is matching the best and most exceptional founder talent with the best ideas, the best healthcare partners and the best in capital partners," Jones said. "Where you see that adaptation is that we're ultimately matching the best local founders with the best ideas geared towards the local market, pairing them with the best in local healthcare players and matched with the most aligned capital who are interested in seeing successes in those markets."
Investing in AI to build enduring companies
AI is shaping the healthcare investment market, and Redesign Health seeks to back sophisticated AI startups. At the same time, internally, the venture firm built its own AI operating system that can synthesize eight years' worth of research and insights to inform its investment strategy.
"Everything that we do in venture and technology—backing, building, and investing—comes down to knowledge and relationships: the things that we know and the people that we know. It turns out that computers are pretty good understanding knowledge and relationships," said Aron Szanto, head of technology at Redesign Health. “We baked what we believe is about a million hours of expert human research and about 100,000 people and organizations in our global healthcare network into our AI operating system, which we call Atlas.”
According to Szanto, Atlas is the foundation of every pillar of Redesign Health's business from sourcing and assessing founders to conducting diligence and research and evaluating opportunities, concepts and ideas for startups, he noted. The company also uses Atlas to support portfolio companies' business development efforts through the entire life cycle, from ideation to exit, he added.
Szanto, a classical musician by background, is an AI researcher, engineer and self-described "recovering mathematician" who joined the venture firm two years ago after leading machine learning products development at PathAI and natural language processing and ML at Kensho.
The biggest unlock from the AI operating system is connecting the dots across Redesign Health's growing global ecosystem of founders, portfolio companies, healthcare partners, investors and advisors, Shaheen said.
"Effectively helping ensure that the right stakeholders are connected at the right time to explore areas of mutual interest. That turns out to be a difficult problem, but one that LLMs and other genAI tools are uniquely positioned to solve," he noted.
Redesign is essentially using AI models, built on its investors' knowledge and research, to help build the most successful startups based on an analysis of both founder profiles and healthcare startup concepts, according to Szanto.
"The most valuable asset, by far, at an early-stage company is the founder or founding team. And we spent something like the last seven or eight years deeply studying and quantitatively researching the factors and characteristics of highly successful founders. We have organizational psychologists on staff to help us understand what successful entrepreneurs do, where they come from, and what makes them tick," he said. "This founder intelligence system helps us connect the dots between the wide world of potential founders and the wide world of prospective startups that we might want to back them in building."
The company's AI model can also analyze hundreds of startup ideas generated by Redesign Health's team to create more data-driven due diligence.
"For each one of these ideas, we put it through a really rigorous and AI-led research process where it goes out to our million hours of research that we've done pre-AI on every area of healthcare, try to map it to opportunity zone and competitive differentiation. It can answer questions like, who exactly is the right type of founder? Do you need a physician on staff from day one? How would you differentiate from the ways in which this has been tried before? If this is an AI business, what about the technology has now opened up some particular capability or economic reality that is now transforming this particular area of healthcare?"
Redesign Health aims to use AI to develop a "superhuman level" of intelligence, computation and knowledge that incorporates the taste and judgment of its team members, Szanto said.
"You can imagine a world where Redesign is this venture company. You can also imagine us being truly a technology outfit, where you know everything from our internal platform to the companies that we back to the founders that we're fortunate enough to work with are all informed by this technological lens, even as the rising tide of technology and innovation enable us to do more and more cool things," he said.