While economic turmoil is making waves in the venture capital market, some New York-based healthtech startups continue to draw large investments.
On Tuesday, Midtown-based digital health benefits platform Healthee announced it raised a $50 million Series B to advance its main product, an artificial intelligence program that analyzes and answers questions about the often byzantine health plans offered by employers.
The deal follows a $75 million Series D for a similar company, Union Square-based Chapter, which helps seniors compare Medicare plans. That investment brought the valuation of the company, which was co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy and backed early by JD Vance and Peter Theil, to $1.5 billion.
The Healthee fundraise, one of the largest among New York-based health startups in 2025, was led by Israel-based venture capital firm Key1 Capital. Previous investors, Fin Capital, Glilot Capital Partners and Group11, also pitched in.
The company’s platform functions as a kind of virtual human resources, helping employees compare health plans, determine whether they are covered for certain procedures and find in-network providers, according to Vice President of Marketing Omer Maman. The company’s “secret sauce” is a cost transparency tool that estimates the price of services before a patient receives them based on a model trained on 20 billion claims, allowing people to shop around before committing to a provider, Maman said.
“We want to bring the consumerism to health care so you have the same experience as you have with Amazon with your health benefit,” he said.
The Healthee fundraise follows a period of growth for the startup, which has more than 15,000 customers, including large employers like Instacart, SiriusXM and Celonis, the company said Tuesday. With the new capital, the company will market its product to more employers and develop other parts of the platform, like a tool to compare pharmacy benefits, Maman said.
Uncertainty in the markets has led many investors to hunker down, dashing recently held prospects of a big year for dealmaking. The sudden sea change, precipitated in recent weeks by President Donald Trump’s tariff policies, has reshaped the venture capital landscape, leading large investments to make up a bigger portion of overall activity and concentrating deals in the traditional bi-coastal hubs of San Francisco and New York – a shift from the post-pandemic trend of more diffuse dealmaking, according to a first-quarter analysis from the research firm PitchBook.
Companies pitching AI-backed products continue to prevail, as do digital health companies, which brought in $5.9 billion across 356 deals in the first quarter of 2025, according to PitchBook.
