Our Investment into Sahha
We are thrilled to announce that Aura Ventures has led the Seed round for Sahha.
We first met the team in early April this year and were beyond excited to be supporting them on their journey and are looking forward to the impact they will have on many lives. US VC firm Supermoon capital, Antler and various strategic angel investors also participated in the investment round.
The “thirst for data” in HealthTech: A two-pronged problem
In recent years, we have seen the widespread digitisation and fragmentation and “debundling” of the Healthtech stack into modalised services.
This is fuelled by both a “push” from consumers who demand more ownership and more convenience solutions; a “pull” effect as advanced in AI and ML now mean having a robust digital focus is table stakes to remain competitive for organisations, e.g., from insurers in premium pricing to consumer-facing healthtech apps to drug adherence programs.
As a result of this paradigm shift, the market is at a maturing point for disruption. The inflection and readiness to adopt wearables tracking data by consumers, e.g., Oura rings, CGM devices, advances in Apple Health API, is a testament to this .
We believe there is still a gap in leveraging this data to drive outcomes and personalised user experiences. Ultimately, the gap between applied neuroscience and UX.
To double click into this, for example, in mental health, early, accurate detection and improved accessibility are significant pain points, i.e., GPs currently identify only 47% of depression cases they see. Traditionally, the manual and often biased data are collected through surveys or other subjective means, allowing for more accurate indications on user health status. Globally, mental health has a staggering $1T+ negative economic impact and the market for solutions that seamlessly integrate into people’s live is booming. Forward-thinking companies with a robust digital healthcare strategy are turning to scalable AI and ML technologies to align with this paradigm shift.
Sahha is the enabler to deliver personalised health and wellbeing
Sahha enables companies to understand how users think and feel at scale, enabling them to build meaningful, personalised health and well-being experiences.
Through Sahha’s API, companies not only can access essential behavioural, physical and mental health data but also allows them to analyse them for insights, empowering them to build compelling solutions that will meet and exceed consumer demands. Sahha does this by building algorithms that guide their customer’s users towards positive behavioural change to create more resilient mental and physical health.
Their focus on product explainability is at the core of their ML models. As such, they provide backed insights to give a sense of agency back to the user about their mental health. Their recently launched resilience models provide a privacy-first and accurate risk/resilience score for depression, anxiety, stress and sleep health that considers hundreds of behaviours and years of science.
Companies globally are adopting Sahha to provide more compelling value to individuals. Sahha's technology has use cases across health providers and insurers, EAPs, eHealth, mental health apps and even chronic health companies.
A scientific and entrepreneurial team
Building a world class, HealthTech API based business is no easy feat. First and foremost, the team is mission-driven, developing their life’s work in this startup with a strong passion to tackle the problem that is personal and close to their hearts.
They also have the right balance of neuroscience and business acumen to execute on it. Aleks is the founder and CEO of Sahha. He has a broad skillset, with a background in software engineering, product design and sales. He has been creating companies since 2014 with some still running today, having passed the baton on. His tenacity is complemented by an agile team setup, which indexes heavily to technical, neuroscience and data science talents.
Sahha has been able to repeatedly attract the best tech, data and neuro-science talent in ANZ and SEA. Other core team members have PhDs in neuroscience and are likewise determined by their mission.
The ‘corn’ of the crop
Our thesis behind Sahha aligns with our deep-dive into Generative AI (viewable here). From the very first introductory call with Aleks, the energy was amazing. We were vision-aligned from a thesis perspective. Sahha plays in a unique wedge in the generative AI and AI/ML market landscape.
They are one of a kind. Their product is backed by extensive existing research in the field of digital phenotypes, as well as their own scientific studies, in partnership with the University of Otago that has given them unique insight into the technology and allowed them to develop significant IP from day zero. Their product-led-growth strategy and platform-agnostic nature allows for the rapid ensembling of data from each new customer, meaning their product will get better and better with the addition of RLHF.
Just like corn is everlasting and pivotal for food produce, able to be processed into many different consumer goods, Sahha will be the “table stakes” and the “corn” for organisations that want to advance their digital health strategies and require behavioural data and analytics on their customers. There unique API business model is the key to unlock this.
You can read more about Sahha in the Australian exclusive here and in the NBR here
This article was written by Annie Liao of Aura Ventures. Read more about venture capital.
