Eka Ventures

We're excited to launch our weekly newsletter at Eka, and what better way to do it than to announce that we are now a certified B-Corporation 🥳! We share our key learnings in the post below. Subscribe to get the latest Impact VC news in your inbox every Friday, and feel free to share with the wider community. Jon Coker Camilla Dolan Hamish Law Alicia Walker

Wrapping up an exciting events week at Eka Ventures 🎉 What better way to kick off the summer season than with ecosystem mixers? We hosted two thematic events across our climate & health networks to link up operators, investors, and policy makers.. read on! 🤖 💊 Sitrep: Health x AI x Policy with Form Ventures 💊 🤖 How can we best scale AI within the NHS to enable lasting system change? Startups must decide between building broad versus building deep, and building regulated versus unregulated, which in turn shapes their commercial opportunity. This seems to be the 2-D axis that innovators are building against, and not all of the combinations work in the NHS context.. We've written up some more detailed notes alongside Andrew Bennett which will come next week. Watch this space 👀 Thank you to Finn Stevenson from Flok Health and Johan Ordish at Roche for leading the conversation, alongside many others beyond the LinkedIn tagging limit! Special thanks too to Mohadeseh A. at Molten Ventures for hosting us in your offices 🙏 🛻 ⚡️ Urban Environment x Decarbonisation with Sustainable Future Ventures ⚡️ 🛻 What does will an electrified future look like for the urban environment? We asked Archy de Berker at Axle Energy, Mathias Krieger at HIVED, Natasha Jones at Metris Energy, ⚡ Mike Strahlman ⚡ at Piclo, and Luke Le Brun at PATRIZIA SE to crystal ball what the future holds in each of their respective industries from transportation, flexibility markets, solar energy, to real estate investing. A big thank you to Matthew Chagan at Sustainable Future Ventures for co-hosting this with us and moderating the panel 🙏 Can't wait to see what the rest of summer holds.. stay tuned 👀 ☀️ Jon Coker Camilla Dolan Hamish Law Alicia Walker

Flok Health founder: Software can be taught clinical reasoning at scale. 💬 Finn Stevenson is the co-founder of Flok Health, an AI-powered digital physiotherapy clinic for treating musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions. Stevenson, a former professional rower, co-founded Flok Health in 2022 with Ric da Silva. After leaving rowing and its access to quality physiotherapy, Stevenson was taken aback by the long NHS wait lists and high private healthcare costs. ➡️ https://lnkd.in/et8dxq9k 🔗 #software #news #founder #healthcare #nhs #clinicalscale #automation #founderstories #founderin5 #UKtech

Ripples are back at The Drop for year 3, and we're excited because there will be a whole lot of them hosted by a whole lot of our amazingly cool and expert climate friends. 😎 Here's a look at the first three: 1. 💡 Building the Climate Tech Infobahn: How to design climate tech learning - hosted by Ben James, benjames.io (Ben James) & Art Lapinsch 🔋🌳🛡️, Delphi Zero 2. 📈 Climate-Aligned Capital: Unlocking scalable growth for climate companies - hosted by Camilla Dolan, Eka Ventures & Katya Constant, The Climate Brick 3.🪻 Green Buildings: The key to net zero - hosted by Kia Nejad, A/O & Caie Kelley, Lowercarbon Capital 🧠 Ripples are small, interactive sessions organized by and for the climate community. They focus on deep knowledge sharing on a specific topic to drive it forward and accelerate the transition. 🎟️ Get on the waitlist for a ticket to The Drop and join us 👉 https://lnkd.in/dK7BKk2r

We explored the new frontiers in medical AI in our latest newsletter 🤖 💻 Google released a paper showcasing the performance of Med Gemini against State of the Art Benchmarks (SoTA), and showed that the model established new SoTA benchmarks on 10 of the 14 analysed criteria (in comments). 👩⚕️ Clinicians actually prefer Med-Gemini's medical summarisation, doctor referral generation, and medical simplification compared to actual experts (circa 70% preference rate on average across the three metrics). 🏥 Many still anticipate broader artificial intelligence adoption to be slow given the typical health-specific hurdles (regulatory approvals, EHR-specific integrations with Epic and Cerner Corporation, and clinician trust). 💼 Competitors like Suki or Abridge, who has raised >$150m, are already working with hospital heavyweights. For example, Abridge is already working with the likes of Emory Healthcare and Sutter Health to automate clinical conversations. 📊 There is still some way to go before seeing these solutions implemented across broader health systems. But this is definitely an incremental positive in improving health workflows. Camilla Dolan Jon Coker Hamish Law Alicia Walker

We took a look at how consumers are shifting their health behaviours away from GPs & ERs towards consumer apps. 💊 75% of people have now used virtual care, and this has been stable for the past three years. Now, the focus will be on increasing frequency and depth of product usage. 👩⚕️ Over 60% of the population did a Covid-19 test. This hasn't translated into other health areas like microbiome, genetics, or fertility. In fact, the second highest at-home test is genetics, and that only has 1/5 of the penetration of Covid tests (13%). 📊 Consumers are getting smart on their health data. We now trust banks more than health care providers with our data (grocers & tech companies also get a tough time here). Will this change who can build consumer data moats? As always, if you're a founder building in the Consumer Health space, we'd love to chat and debate! Read about all this & more in our latest newsletter (in comments). Jon Coker Camilla Dolan Hamish Law Alicia Walker 23andMe Evvy Everly Health Neko Health Newfoundland Diagnostics

LONDON CALLING: On April 4th, join our Investment team and Eka Ventures in London for an early-stage climate tech founders meet-up. It's the perfect opportunity to network, share ideas, and have some fun.🏌️♂️ If you are an early-stage climate tech founder, DM Tomas Kemtys or Patrikas Feiferas with a brief description of your current company/role. The event is almost full, and we have a few last spots left. 😎   PS: In London and working on climate tech? We're always looking to connect with new faces in the UK’s climate tech scene. 🤝 ☕