While the desire to monitor one’s health and fitness has always been important, the COVID-19 pandemic has made the world even more conscious of their health.

Thanks to new wearable technology and instant result monitors, this has paved the path for the establishment of various healthcare startups around the world. Statistics suggest that 15% of users (age 18-29) and 8% of users (age 30-49) use a health application. These ranges anywhere from monitoring your steps to measuring your heart rate to help you stay within your target rate. Y Combinator is at the forefront of this wave of health tech startups – they seeded nearly 40 early-stage startups focuses on healthcare this year.

Here’s a quick look at each of the 40 health tech companies that launched out of YC demo days in 2020: Day 1, Day 2

Y Combinator’s 40 Health Tech Startups

Abalone Bio developed a technology to find antibody drugs that activate and modulate cell surface receptors, the “antennae” on cells that help convert chemical signals into cellular responses, like growth.
Adyn is a biotechnology company that focuses on designing safer birth control options.
Altay develops therapies to treat chronic liver diseases Altay develops small molecule drugs to treat chronic liver diseases like liver fibrosis and liver cancer. Our co-founder Dr. Osman Ozes, led the first drug development program for Esbriet (Pirfenidone), resulting in the first FDA-approved therapy for lung fibrosis. Esbriet is now a $1 billion/year drug and has already made over $6 billion in revenue.
Biocogniv is developing artificial intelligence models that can screen and predict outcomes. Its latest products are plugins for electronic health records systems (EHRs), and its first product can screen patients for COVID-19 by analyzing standard blood test results – instantly, and with 95% sensitivity.
Candid Health automates medical billing for healthcare providers. Its first product is an API that healthcare startups use to submit insurance claims – kind of like Stripe for medical billing.
Corecare automatically matches patient data between healthcare providers, insurance companies, and the government to eliminate patient data errors in healthcare. This problem is significant – 20% of Electronic Health Records have a patient data error (something as simple as mistyping a patient’s date of birth) which leads to over $800B a year in administrative costs for the industry.
Cyberdontics is building robots to automate dentistry, starting with dental crowns. Dental crowns are one of the longest, most frequent, and most expensive dental procedures. We take this 2 hour, 2 visit procedure and will do a better job in 15minutes. 8x faster than the average dentist.
Daybreak Health specializes in providing online counseling services, especially for teens, helping to stabilize their mental fitness.
Dropprint Genomics provides cell technology and machine learning models that characterize the immune system. It offers big data to the immune system by generating personalized maps of a patient’s immune systems to better understand, control, and improve immune health.
Equator Therapeutics develops a drug that burns calories and improves metabolism. It offers a drug that can solve obesity and type 2 diabetes problem because it addresses the root cause of metabolic disorders. Its drug will target mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell.
Fair Square Medicare provides a consumer-friendly way for seniors to buy health insurance. The company offers a quantitative and systematic approach to finding coverage.
Felix is focused on accelerating the deployment of novel biotherapeutics targeting urgent microbial challenges in human health and beyond.
Gilgamesh is a discovery and early development biotech company developing small molecules complemented by biomarkers to treat mental illness. The company leverages deep expertise in the medicinal chemistry and neuroscience of psychedelic compounds to develop innovative medicines.
H1 is a developer of a healthcare data analytics platform intended to help companies make smarter scientific decisions.The company specializes in providing real-time data to support the end-to-end therapeutic development process from fundraising to product development to product launch
inSoma Bio integrates biology & materials science to create biomaterials that solve problems in tissue engineering & regenerative medicine.
Kingdom Supercultures designs novel microbial cultures that make it easy for food manufacturers to create exciting new foods. They have designed microbial communities that produce the world’s first 0-calorie fermented soda, beers with new flavors, and new yogurt-like smoothies.
Known Medicine is looking to take the experimentation of how tumors respond to cancer drugs out of the patient’s body and into the lab. The startup breaks down tumor samples into micro tumors, which they treat separately inside specialized micro-environments with different methods and see what works best.
Kuleana creates plant-based alternatives for people’s seafood favorites, using plants and biotechnology without the environmental and ethical consequences.
LabGrid makes browser-first tools for biotech. The startup enable high-throughput science by handling data analysis for plate-based experiments. Scientists can merge, analyze, and share data and protocols in-browser, helping them work faster and more confidently with their teams.
Liyfe Clinic is an Oncology Patient-Reported Outcome Platform for Symptom Tracking, Management, and Education. Patients can use our app-based solution to track symptoms, access personalized education resources and access oncology certified nurses 24/7.
Lume Health is a web-based platform that reviews, compensation data, and job recommendations for nurses. Lume helps nurses quickly find their ideal jobs by providing them with access to thousands of trusted nurse-submitted reviews, salary data points, hospital profiles, and personalized job recommendations upfront.
Menten AI designs protein drugs and enzymes using quantum computing and machine learning. Their technology leapfrogs current computational methods making it possible to design previously intractable proteins. The team created the first protein design algorithm for current and near-term quantum computers and created the world’s first protein designed on a quantum computer.
OpenBiome is a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding safe access to fecal microbiota transplants (FMT), and to catalyzing research.
Ophelia helps people quit opioids without going to rehab. It offer online doctor’s visits, withdrawal medication delivered to your home, and support for long-term recovery, using a protocol 6x more effective than most rehabs
Osmind builds a care platform for treatment-resistant mental health to accelerate drug development. Their software and insights improve clinical care while advancing research towards new treatments and precision health.
PostEra uses machine learning to close the design-make-test loop of drug discovery and reduce its clients’ cycle times. PostEra is building a one-stop-shop for medicinal chemistry, powered by machine learning, to serve the world’s ever expanding community of drug hunters.
Revel Technologies is making the world’s first caffeine alternative, paraxanthine. It’s better than caffeine at waking you up and causes fewer side effects, like anxiety and jitteriness.
RingMD is a healthcare network designed to connect patients with medical doctors and wellness practitioners independently of location.
Savvy is solving one of the fundamental issues with US healthcare — employer-sponsored health insurance. The current health insurance model puts an undue burden on employers, gives little choice and personalization to the consumer, and creates poor incentives for the entire healthcare system.
Sayana is a mental wellness app that helps people track their thoughts and feelings daily, get relevant tips on how to cope with emotions, and match with people in a similar life situation.
Segmed is a cloud-based platform that provides a solution for medical companies to get image labels and accelerates the development of medical AI algorithms.
Simple Strips make glucose test strips that are scanned with a smartphone camera instead of a meter. To use this first slide the strip into the holder and apply a tiny blood sample, then hover the phone camera over the strip to scan, and save the result and log the insulin and meds doses.
SiPhox offers a handheld testing device with RNA/DNA and protein testing for point-of-care and At-Home solutions.
Tambua Health uses lung sound analysis to transform the diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases. The company offers precise, non-invasive, and radiation-free lung imaging and lung function testing using acoustic technology.
Trident Bioscience is a biotech company that stays abreast of the latest technological trends in leading protein structure. Trident Bioscience builds tools to expedite the discovery and optimization of useful proteins.
VenoStent is a medical device company that develops a bioresorbable shape memory polymer to reduce dialysis access failures. VenoStent strives to address these issues with its development of SelfWrap – a perivascular wrap designed to reduce failures at the vein-artery or vein-graft junction of dialysis patients.
Vena Vitals offers an innovative solution to monitor blood pressure by using a soft stretchable sensor that provides clinical accuracy.
Verifiable is building an API to automate license verification for healthcare providers, integrating with state and federal sources.
Vitable Health is a healthcare safeguard that gives acute and preventative coverage. Get acute and preventative protection. Vitable’s providers make virtual and concierge in-home visits. Lab tests, imaging, and prescription discounts covered. No copays. No deductibles.
Volumetric is advanced biomaterials and biofabrication company that develops a 3D bioprinting platform intended to create materials with living cells with applications in biomaterials, cancer research, and human organ replacements.

Thank you YC 2020 Alum for innovating tomorrow’s health tech. We wish you success.

John Diep

Website | + posts

Founder, Editor-In-Chief // A native Angeleno. John studied engineering at UCLA; founded Schmoozd, an offline social tech networking event in LA with 30,000 subs; ran a startup accelerator (StartEngine). Worked for several major brands like Toyota, DIRECTV, Hitachi, ICANN, and Raytheon. A mentor at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) Entrepreneur School, Dr. David Choi. And advises a dozen local LA startups building amazing tech in various industries; and invested in some. // Let's Connect: john@lastartups.com