Olive, a healthcare automation company, has started helping early-stage entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground with the creation of Olive Ventures.

The in-house studio is focused on fostering new digital health startups that will create innovative products and services for the healthcare industry.

"We're bridging the 'valley of death' in the healthcare startup landscape," Sean Lane, CEO of Olive, said in a statement. "I've seen far too many great ideas be shot down without ever completing a pilot project. We're charting a new path for digital health innovators by killing the traditional pilot and rewriting the entire process to be better, smarter and faster."

Through a regimented studio process, Olive Ventures gives its portfolio companies access to Olive’s suite of technology applications to ideate, research and build with predetermined milestones and support along the way.

Once a startup is ready to spin out, Olive Ventures helps it expand for additional funding – an important step for scaling the product and increasing adoption, the company said.

WHAT’S THE IMPACT?

Olive Ventures already has two digital health startups in its portfolio, Violet and Rotera.

Violet is creating tech solutions to help patients stay out of medical debt. Through its membership-based platform, the company helps patients find care and then pay the bill in installments that work for their budgets.

Rotera, the first company built in the Olive Ventures studio, creates artificial intelligence “co-workers” to assist health systems, payers and healthcare vendors. The company leverages Olive’s newest service, Olive Helps, an application for healthcare workers that provides real-time assistance for day-to-day tasks, to develop custom tools for its clients.

"After 15 years in healthcare IT, I'm proud to build the first business in what will become an ecosystem of companies built on Olive," Erick McKesson, CEO of Rotera, said in a statement.

"Through Olive Ventures, we brought an idea to market inside a month that will positively impact thousands of healthcare workers in our first year alone. When it comes to creating a company, the time to market and immediate impact we can have with Olive is truly unmatched in healthcare."

THE LARGER TREND

Earlier this summer, Olive boosted its valuation to $4 billion after scoring a whopping $400 million in funding led by Vista Equity Partners.

Digital health has become a hotbed for innovation and, in turn, investor dollars. During the first half of the year, the sector racked up $14.7 billion in funding – already more than 2020’s full-year amount of $14.6 billion.

Spurred by its market potential, a number of other medical device and digital health companies also have venture capital subsidiaries, including WELL Health Technologies, Dexcom, Boston Scientific and Medtronic.