Wavemaker 360 Launches New $64M Fund for Health Care Startups

Keerthi Vedantam

Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.

Wavemaker 360 Launches New $64M Fund for Health Care Startups
Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Despite a venture funding slowdown that has not spared the health care and biotech sectors, one Los Angeles fund is looking to back its next crop of seed-stage health startups.

Wavemaker 360 Health, the Pasadena-based early-stage health care VC firm, announced on Thursday that it has closed its $64 million second fund—a haul nearly four times the size of its $17 million first fund, albeit smaller than the $100 million maximum target it set for itself two years ago. The new vehicle will look to invest in 40 to 50 early-stage startups mostly in the U.S. and across the health care spectrum, from digital health and pharma to medical devices and artificial intelligence.


“The health care industry might not be recession-proof—but the health care industry is about as recession-resistant as it gets,” Wavemaker general partner Jay Goss told dot.LA. “Human beings are always going to need health care. We have more and more health care products and services than ever before, and we have an aging population in this country.

The new fund will initially invest up to $1 million in each startup and add more over time, Goss said. Wavemaker has already deployed capital from the second fund to 15 startups; one of them, Seattle-based remote patient monitoring platform Alertive Healthcare, has already rewarded Wavemaker with an exit via its acquisition by Carbon Health last year.

The VC firm raised the $64 million fund from around 300 limited partners (LPs)—nearly quadrupling the 80 investors who contributed to Wavemaker’s first fund, which closed in 2019. Those LPs include health care organizations like the Long Beach-based SCAN Foundation, a charity dedicated to improving care for older adults, as well as industry executives and physicians. Goss described Wavemaker’s investors as the fund’s “secret weapon,” since they provide its portfolio startups with access to key connections at hospitals, insurance companies and other industry groups.

“It's harder to get those first three or four or five commercial successes under your belt as a health care entrepreneur,” Goss said. “So we have so much ability to help these startups by virtue of who our limited partners are. We flex that muscle all over the health care industry.”

Wavemaker, which launched in 2018, now has more than $85 million in assets under management across its two funds. The firm has invested in around 45 startups to date including Ready, Set, Food!, an L.A.-based food allergy startup that received a $350,000 investment from Mark Cuban on “Shark Tank” in 2020.

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Starships Were Meant To Fly: Astrolab's New Jeep-Sized Rover Gets a Lift from SpaceX

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
Starships Were Meant To Fly: Astrolab's New Jeep-Sized Rover Gets a Lift from SpaceX
Photo by Samson Amore

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Local Los Angeles-area startup Astrolab Inc. has designed a new lunar vehicle called FLEX, short for Flexible Logistics and Exploration Rover. About the size of a Jeep Wrangler, FLEX is designed to move cargo around the surface of the moon on assignment. It’s a bit larger than NASA’s Mars rovers, like Perseverance, but as it’s designed for transport and mobility rather than precision measurement, it can travel much faster, at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour across the lunar surface.

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Meet the Creator Economy’s Version of LinkedIn

Kristin Snyder

Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.

Meet the Creator Economy’s Version of LinkedIn
Creatorland

This is the web version of dot.LA’s daily newsletter. Sign up to get the latest news on Southern California’s tech, startup and venture capital scene.

LinkedIn hasn’t caught on with Gen Z—in fact, 96% rarely use their existing account.

Considering 25% of young people want to be full-time content creators and most influencers aren’t active on LinkedIn, traditional networking sites aren’t likely to meet these needs.

Enter CreatorLand.

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https://twitter.com/ksnyder_db

This Week in ‘Raises’: Total Network Services Gains $9M, Autio Secures $5.9M

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

This Week in ‘Raises’: Total Network Services Gains $9M, Autio Secures $5.9M
This Week in ‘Raises’:

It has been a slow week in funding, but a local decentralized computing network managed to land $9 million to accelerate deployment of its new product called Universal Communication Identifier (UCID™). Another local company that secured capital included Kevin Costner’s location-based audio storytelling platform and the funding will go toward expanding the app’s content library and expanding into additional regions in the United States.

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