Healthleap raises $38M for hospital risk alerts

The startup says its AI now runs in more than 50 hospitals, scanning records for signs of malnutrition, delirium and other risks.

Healthleap, a startup that uses AI to scan patient records for signs of undiagnosed illness, has raised $38 million in seed and Series A funding. The company says its software is already running in more than 50 hospitals and is designed to flag patients who may need closer review, not replace medical diagnosis. That distinction matters, because hospitals want earlier warnings without handing clinical decisions over to software. As IT-PUB News reports, Healthleap is pitching its system as a way to surface hidden risks that routine care can miss.

The funding round brings in major investors, but the larger story is the problem Healthleap is trying to solve. Hospital teams are under pressure to catch issues earlier, especially conditions that can be missed in standard workflows. The company’s system focuses on information buried in clinical notes, alongside structured data such as lab results and vital signs, to identify patients who may be at risk of malnutrition, delirium and other conditions.

Healthleap grew from a nutrition product into a hospital platform

Healthleap was founded in South Africa in 2022 by siblings Jemima and Josiah Meyer. It began with a clinical nutrition tool built by Jemima for dietitians, then shifted toward a broader platform for hospitals.

That change moved the company beyond a narrower workflow tool and toward wider clinical screening. According to CEO and co-founder Josiah Meyer, the platform is now built to identify hospital patients who may be suffering from conditions that often are not caught early enough.

He pointed to malnutrition and delirium in particular. Those problems are not always obvious from basic charts alone, but they can affect recovery and lead to worse outcomes if they go unnoticed.

The software reads notes alongside labs and vital signs

Healthleap connects to a hospital’s electronic health record system and uses language models to extract details from written notes. The company says that matters because some of the most useful signals do not appear in structured fields. Instead, they may show up in clinicians’ text — references to poor appetite, recent weight loss, muscle loss or trouble swallowing.

It then combines that information with structured data such as lab reports and vital signs to generate risk models. Healthleap says the software highlights patients for further review rather than diagnosing them.

Meyer said the company analyzes each adult inpatient record every night, looking at lab results, vital signs, weights, medications, diet orders, diagnoses and clinicians’ notes. Each morning, it writes a risk score into the care team’s existing workflow, along with a dashboard showing additional information about patient trends.

The appeal is easy to see. Hospitals do not have to manually search through every note to find every warning sign. Still, the approach depends on how well the models interpret clinical language and how carefully care teams use the alerts in practice.

Hospitals are using it to screen for malnutrition and delirium

Healthleap says its platform is already deployed in more than 50 hospitals, where it screens for conditions including malnutrition and delirium. The company has also built programs to identify aspiration pneumonia, pressure ulcers and risk of readmission for congestive heart failure, though it says those are still undergoing further clinical validation.

Its emphasis on malnutrition stands out. Healthleap says the condition is often missed and can affect recovery in several ways. The company points to research suggesting that 20% to 50% of hospital inpatients are malnourished, and that studies have linked the condition to longer stays, impaired wound healing, infections and other complications, as well as higher morbidity and mortality.

The target, then, is a very specific hospital problem: patients who may not look obviously ill in the usual data, but who still face meaningful risk.

Investors are backing expansion as hospital customers grow

The $38 million financing includes an $8 million seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital and First Round Capital, plus a $30 million Series A led by Hummingbird Ventures. Healthleap is not disclosing its valuation.

Meyer said the company has grown from three hospital partners to more than 50 over the past year. Its customers now include Penn Medicine, Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain, Houston Methodist and Emory Healthcare. He also said revenue has grown more than 10x over the same period, though he did not provide exact figures.

Healthleap sells three-year contracts priced according to a hospital’s licensed bed count, and it also uses an outcome-based pricing model. Meyer said the company ties pricing to measurable return on investment that a hospital finance team validates and attributes to the product.

He said every customer has seen at least a 5x hard ROI, with some seeing more than 20x annual total ROI. Those figures are the company’s own claims and were not independently verified in the source, but they help explain why investors are putting more money behind the product.

At the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Healthleap says its malnutrition program produced $23.8 million in annualized financial impact. Of that, $6.3 million came from additional reimbursement and $17.5 million from shorter hospital stays.

Healthleap wants to add more conditions and care settings

Healthleap plans to use the new funding for engineering, product, sales and customer success as it expands support for more conditions. Meyer said the long-term goal is to cover more than 40 major health conditions.

The company also wants to move beyond hospitals into outpatient and home care. That would extend the reach of the system, but it would also bring the same core idea — using AI to flag hidden risk — into settings where patient data and care workflows work differently.

For hospitals, the pitch is straightforward: earlier detection can mean better care and, in some cases, better financial results. The limit is just as clear. Healthleap says its software is meant to support clinical review, not make diagnoses, and its value will depend on how reliably it identifies the right patients without flooding clinicians with noise.