SV Angel Says Health Informatics Is One Of Its New ?Megatrends?

SV Angel, one of the Valley’s best-known early-stage firms, says it’s starting to look heavily at health startups that take a “software-first approach” towards human biology, medical research and patient care. The firm has always had a list of six to eight “megatrends” that it invests prolifically in. Right now, those are big data, social commerce, online-to-offline commerce, education tech, the sharing economy and the “Internet of things.” Now they’re adding “health informatics” to that list. By that, SV Angel is looking for startups that “use software, IT and data science to help diagnose, treat, reduce and cure disease – at the physical, mental and emotional levels.” It’s a broader definition than just bioinformatics, because it encompasses medical records and other types of patient data. Managing director David Lee, who is a cancer survivor, said that the firm finally feels comfortable with the idea that software is about to eat?healthcare. “I’m not a biologist. I don’t invest in biotech companies. We’re software investors first and foremost,” he said. “But the more I learned about bioinformatics and health records, the more I felt that the timing was ripe.” A couple things are feeding into this. For one, the costs of genome sequencing are falling dramatically. The cost of sequencing a full human genome has gone from $100 million in 2001 to $8,000 today — even faster than Moore’s Law. Secondly, there are meaningful governmental and financial incentives to move toward electronic medical records. (It’s also just common sense to move away from paper records.) He pointed to investments in companies like Counsyl (which I profiled earlier this week), Benchling and medical records startups like Elation EMR and Practice Fusion. There are also younger startups like Medisas, which is building software to help with patient hand-offs and transfers. A few other firms like Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and Felicis Ventures have carved out reputations over the past few years for aggressively investing in health tech. Note that no one here is backing companies that require an expensive, 10-year drug testing cycle overseen by the FDA. All of these firms tend to look for companies that have less regulatory risk, like in the medical devices space or with diagnostics and bioinformatics. SV Angel has been one of the most prolific backers of social networking, real-time, mobile (and yes, even SoLoMo) startups over the past few years. So are they eating their words? “People

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