VC Investors Like Health IT

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John Pulley By John Pulley

By John Pulley

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Last year venture capitalists invested $460 million in health IT companies, a 19 percent increase over 2009, notes Moukheiber. Investment growth is driven largely by federal subsidies to health-care providers implementing electronic health records, she says. Venture capitalists are bullish on health IT, with a survey showing that three out of four venture capitalists had projected health IT investing would continue growing this year.

As predicted, venture capitalists continue to be bullish on health IT.

A number of the business investors who made it onto Forbes magazine's "Midas List" of top VCs in the technology sector are plowing cash into health IT, writes Forbes Healthworks blogger Zina Moukheiber. Health IT-friendly investors include:

  • Bryan Roberts, of Venrock, with investments in Athenahealth, RelayHealth and Castlight Health.
  • Michael Moritz, of Sequoia Capital, with investments in companies including HealthCentral, ZirMed and AirStrip Technologies.
  • Chris Gabrieli, of Bessemer Venture Partners, founder of GMIS and an investor in Allscripts.
  • Polaris Ventures, investing in CodeRyte, Phytel, HealthCentral and Phreesia.
  • Oak Investment Partners, investing in Castlight, iHealth Technologies and Benefitfocus.
  • Versant Ventures, investing in RedBrick Health and CodeRyte.

That survey, released late last year by the National Venture Capital Association and Dow Jones VentureSource, showed that optimism over the health IT sector outpaced that of numerous other categories, including mobile and telecommunications, energy, software as a service, medical devices, bio-pharmaceutical, financial services and computer hardware.

Only the consumer Internet/digital media and cloud-computing sectors ranked higher on the survey in terms of venture capitalist optimism. And large numbers of venture capitalists said those two sectors were in danger of over-investment, 69 percent for the former versus 47 percent for the latter.

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