Digital Health Funding Sees $1 Billion Boost Since Q1 2025

Funding for digital healthcare startups has reached record levels for the first quarter of the year.

That’s according to findings released Monday (April 6) by venture fund group Rock Health, which said the first three months of 2026 were marked by two “headline records.”

First, total funding reached $4 billion across 110 deals, compared to $3 billion across 122 deals in the first quarter of 2025. In addition, average deal size rose to $36.7 million, the highest average Rock Health said it’s tracked in a single quarter since Q4 of 2021.

“Behind those numbers: 59% of all capital deployed this quarter, one of the highest concentrations we’ve ever seen (just a few percentage points behind Q1 2021’s 62% and Q4 2021’s 61%), came from 12 mega deals,” the report added.

Among these deals were the $575 million Series G round by wearable-maker Whoop, which valued the company at $10.1 billion as it considers an initial public offering (IPO).

OpenEvidence, which has been called the “ChatGPT for doctors,” closed a $250 million Series D in January, its third round in under a year.

And Verily raised $300 million for its precision health AI platform, as it transitions away from under Google’s ownership.

Rock Health also said it was retiring its “AI deal” tracking analysis, as artificial intelligence (AI) has become “table stakes” in how digital health startups and their tools are made and delivered.

“The broader market remains bullish on what AI is worth—AI investment keeps climbing and frontier AI labs are raising at eye-watering valuations—even as open questions about the cost of running foundation models and AI’s longer-term impact on the economy linger,” the report said. “That enthusiasm, and those unresolved questions, are just as present in healthcare as anywhere else—but in a system this complex, the stakes of getting it right or wrong are especially high.”

PYMNTS explored the rise of AI in healthcare earlier this year in a conversation with Marschall Runge, former CEO of Michigan Medicine, one of the country’s top academic medical centers.

He told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster about the promise and the risk of using the technology in a clinical setting.

“AI thinks broadly,” he said. It can track a patient’s age, medications and underlying conditions in mind simultaneously, making connections that a doctor running behind schedule and wrestling with a full caseload might miss. Runge has seen AI surface diagnostic possibilities that trained clinicians hadn’t initially considered. But the risks, he stressed, are real, such as overreliance and misplaced confidence.

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