Summertime, and the buildin’s easy
Summer is in full swing: farmer’s markets are poppin’, temperatures are rising, and funding is too, per Rock Health’s latest quarterly analysis published in our H1 2026 funding recap. Venture-backed digital health startups raised $7.4B across 244 deals over the past six months, notching the highest H1 total since 2022, and surpassing last year’s first half by a full $1B. Notably, that extra billion came through on roughly the same amount of deals, cementing mega deals of $100M+ as a defining feature of today’s market. Put another way, just over 8% of deals absorbed nearly half of all capital deployed.
The exit market has a story to tell too: 115 M&A deals closed in H1, with Q2 2026 the busiest acquisition quarter since 2021. On the public listing front, a growing number of late-stage companies with the expected scale and financial profile are sparking exit watchers’ IPO impatience.
And as capital concentration continues against the backdrop of an AI-powered market rebound, technical differentiation is becoming increasingly harder to sustain. When anyone can build with AI, what holds? We’ve been keeping an eye on how sources of competitive advantage are shifting (and what remains true), and our piece breaks down what we’re seeing as durable moats in the AI era. Pull up a lawn chair, kick off your shoes, and dig into the full H1 recap for more.
Headlines
How OpenAI Plans To Win Over Doctors, Patients And Hospitals
Sam Altman is pitching to clinicians and hospitals as scrutiny mounts Forbes
Teladoc Inks Multi-Year Deal With National Basketball Players Association
Pro athletes are Teladoc’s latest customer base Fierce Healthcare
Physicians' Wearable Data Use Hampered By Reimbursement, Workflow Barriers
Clinicians often see the upside but lack a way to bill for it Healthcare Dive
Crux, eMed Partner To Expand Employer Access To GLP-1 Medications
Benefits platforms keep consolidating around the GLP-1 gold rush MobiHealthNews
Online GLP-1 Prescriptions Are Often Fast, Easy—And Low On Clinical Oversight
Most sites shipped GLP-1s with little clinician engagement STAT
Google Unveils SensorFM, A Foundation Model For Wearable Health Data
New model trained on one trillion-minutes of wearable data from five million participants Forbes
Recent Funding
- Pearl Health lands $110M to expand its risk management platform for Medicare providers
- Operating system for senior living facilities Sage inks $35M
- Handspring Health secures $19M to scale its virtual youth mental health model