Bessemer launches a seed fund for startups applying machine learning to health

Seeing a tremendous opportunity to leverage machine learning technologies in the healthcare industry, Bessemer Venture Partners is launching a $10 million early-stage seed program to back new startups. Led by the firm's celebrity healthcare investor, Steve Kraus (seriously: the guy has his own podcast), and its head of investments in Israel, Adam Fisher, the Deep Health Seed Program will place bets of anywhere between $100,000 and $2 million into early-stage companies using machine learning to solve problems in healthcare. It's no exaggeration to say that machine learning can transform the healthcare industry entirely. The proliferation of data brought on by the increasing digitization of workflows in hospitals, patient information, the popularization of wearables and mapping of the human genome means that everything from the health of populations to the genetic composition of our cells can be monitored -- and potentially managed through the application of data. Bessemer has already placed several bets on this hypothesis, including its investment in Qventus (a hospital management service that we'd covered last month).