Local seed accelerator Health Wildcatters recently announced it added eight new startups to its portfolio, bringing the number of startups under its umbrella to 68 as it enters its sixth year.
“We have an interesting variety of startups in this year’s cohort,” Hubert Zajicek, Health Wildcatters’ CEO, said in a statement. “In previous years we’ve seen trends where more medical devices or health IT would participate. This year we have diagnostics, medical devices, telehealth and digital health companies participating, and the founders are extremely diverse in age and background as well.”
The startups joining Health Wildcatters are:
- CathBuddy: a company developing a reusable closed-catheter system aimed at improving care for single-use intermittent catheter users in the U.S., while trying to decrease healthcare costs and environmental impact.
- Halo Health: a Plano-based healthcare company focused on patient-centric trials to lower patient and location burden. In order to accomplish this, its clinical trials offer remote patient monitoring, patient engagement, and workflow automation.
- Healthy Quit: a pharmacy and digital health company that tackles tobacco use with AI and medications.
- LocuMatch: an application connecting healthcare professionals and facilities by managing temporary physician services for hospital networks, which helps decrease physician shortages in rural areas.
- One Seventeen Media: a mental health company helping school safety for kids through social emotional learning. The company’s platform, “reThinkIt!,” helps kids deal with difficult emotions through chatbot assistants available on demand.
- Noleus Technologies: a startup working to quicken patient recovery after abdominal surgery. The company’s product prevents intestinal wall edema and helps decrease complications.
- Perinatal Access: a company providing convenient high-risk pregnancy care for patients, providers, and insurers. Its telemedicine platform helps physicians provide care to rural locations that would not typically have access to specialty physicians.
- Vitrix Health: a clinical decision support system helping identify oral diseases earlier, with a machine learning EHR to stratify patient risk factors and enable instant communication with specialists.
Health Wildcatters’ Loren Bolton told Dallas Innovates the group had an eventful couple of days together, including getting stuck in an elevator together for 40 minutes while, ironically, practicing their elevator pitches.
“We were on the elevator practicing our elevator pitches, which is a customary Health Wildcatters tradition we do on the first day,” Bolton says. “I guess the elevator thought we all needed a little extra practice.”
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A Dallas Fire-Rescue Department crew had to pry the elevator doors open to free the group. Bolton called it “a first day they’ll never forget.”
Health Wildcatters’ portfolio companies have collectively raised more than $70 million across the past six years.
The new startups will deliver their elevator pitches and be formally introduced to the Dallas/Fort Worth healthcare community in a special event taking place on Sept. 4 at Health Wildcatters.
Lauren Hawkins contributed to this report.
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