Rock Health, the San Francisco-based seed fund and startup accelerator for digital healthcare companies, said today it has raised a new fund, its third and largest.
In the three years since it launched, Rock Health has become a hub of the West Coast digital health scene, providing seed funding, sector data and analysis, events, and physical space for entrepreneurs at its headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, where it moved early this year.
The firm declined to disclose the size of the fund, but it did say it will allow for much larger seed investments, bumping the previous $100,000 limit up to $250,000 per company. Previously, Rock Health’s two funds totaled $4 million.
Investors in the fund are a mix of firms that specialize in backing healthcare companies and major tech VC firms. Kaiser Permanente Ventures, the venture arm of one of the nation’s largest health maintenance organizations, co-led the fund with Bessemer Venture Partners. Prior investors Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, Great Oaks Ventures, and Montreux Equity Partners, which focuses on healthcare startups, also participated.
In addition to better financial support, Rock Health believes its support of its portfolio companies will be a sign that helps them close rounds faster, Rock Health managing director Malay Gandhi wrote on the firm’s blog.
“With this fund, we set out to make the seed funding component of our full-service model even better, with two broad goals: (1) To make it easier for our companies to raise money now, in completing their seed round and (2) to make it easier in the future, on their next round,” Gandhi said.
Rock Health was formed in 2011 and has 55 active investments. While Rock Health has only made seed investments in those companies, they have gone on to raise more than $207 million. Its portfolio includes Lantern and Omada Health, one of the few digital health companies to publish clinical data that support its claims of health benefits.
Its exits include LiftLabs, which Google acquired, and Well, which Weight Watchers bought.
