The most promising 150 private digital health startups working to transform the healthcare industry with new models of primary care to emerging tech solutions for providers. CB Insights' first ever annual cohort of Digital Health 150 startups is a list of 150 of the most promising private companies creating innovative products and services in the $5T healthcare industry, according to CB Insights' Industry Analyst Consensus. Our research team selected the 150 startups from a pool of 5K companies based on several factors, including patent activity, investor profile, news sentiment analysis, proprietary Mosaic scores, market potential, partnerships, competitive landscape, team strength, and tech novelty. For the purposes of this report, digital health is defined as companies in the healthcare space that use technology/software as a key differentiator from their competition. This includes everything from disease diagnostics to tech-driven health insurance platforms to AI tools for drug discovery, and more.

The reason behind many of these failures is that startups are adopting an approach ill-suited to healthcare – a complex and regulated industry with its own set of rules, specific workflows and complicated landscape of stakeholders – patients, doctors, regulators and insurers – all of whom have a say in whether the technology is adopted. Roeland Pater, founder of early stage health tech, Nori Health, is confident that his'need driven approach' to building and developing his AI-powered digital coach aimed at supporting millions with Inflammatory Bowel Disease and IBS will ensure his business will flourish – could this same approach pull startups out of the AI tech bubble? It's set to be a record-breaking year for health tech investments, surpassing the $8.1bn ( €7.3bn) invested in 2018. Babylon Health closed a $550M funding round this August, valuing the company at $2bn! With such sums pouring into this space, waves of digital health startups are making claims that are big, brash and bold.

According to Rock Health, the digital health funding in the first quarter of 2018 reached a whopping $1.6 billion. This is the highest first quarter on record as it surpassed the much-hyped $1.4 billion funding in venture capital during Q1 2016. AI is being applied in 5 different areas of healthcare to improve its overall operations. It is helping in administration, care provision, clinical decision-making, big data analysis, and remote patient monitoring. Founded by Neal Liu, an MIT graduate, the company started receiving funding in 2016.

Rachel is interested in the role technology can play to help us with mental health and wellness. Rachel has also been involved in the development in healthcare apps, one as a consultant and one as a co-founder. One of the apps was aimed primarily at supporting carers and people affected by chronic conditions. Paralign is an anonymous thought and mood tracker. With every thought you record, it connects you to people who have experienced something similar.

Digital health startups looking to solve the pharma industry's problems will be heartened to hear that German life sciences company Bayer is bringing its Grants4Apps accelerator program to San Francisco. That announcement came from Dirk Schapeler, head of Bayer's Lifescience iHub, who was speaking at the Wearable Tech Digital Health Neurotech Silicon Valley conference at Stanford University, Tuesday. Bayer's Lifescience iHub is based in Mountain View, California, and is aimed at infusing the digital component in all of Bayer's businesses including pharmaceuticals through collaboration with tech companies. As such the company is interested in sensors, AI, machine learning and digital apps. Grant4Apps is Bayer's accelerator for digital health startups worldwide.