12 Startups Selected for Village Capital’s Building A Culturally Competent Healthcare System Accelerator

Washington, DC [May, 11 2021] — Village Capital, in collaboration with Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures, an investment vehicle of Johnson & Johnson Foundation, today announced the 12 early-stage startups that were selected to take part in the Building A Culturally Competent Healthcare System program. The accelerator program will support tech-enabled startups focused on providing culturally competent care to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), low-income, or other underserved communities.

Each startup selected for the accelerator will work closely with mentors, potential clients and partners, as well as investors they need to scale their impact, using tools developed to help their self-evaluation, such as Village Capital’s Abaca platform. The top two peer selected companies will be eligible to receive $100,000 USD each in grant funding from Johnson & Johnson Foundation.

“Despite spending more on healthcare than any other country in the world, the US faces vastly inequitable health outcomes for marginalized populations,” said Matt Zieger, Chief Programs Officer- Americas at Village Capital. “Village Capital is excited to work with Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures to support these 12 startups that are improving health equity by addressing the social, economic, cultural or linguistic needs of patients.”

In total, more than 70 startups applied to the program. Each startup was evaluated on criteria including team, business model, and product-market fit. The selection process involved a diverse Advisory Board that included investors, entrepreneurs and industry leaders, but also academics and activists who spoke to the challenges at hand.

The strength of this cohort lies in its diversity. Village Capital is relentlessly focused on supporting founders with lived experience in the problems they’re solving because they create stronger companies. 50% of startups in the program have a female founder or co-founder, 83% have a Black and/or Latinx founder, and 58% are headquartered outside of New York, Boston, or San Francisco/Bay Area.

Here are the 12 startups in the cohort that are working to build a more culturally competent healthcare system in the United States:

• Ayana Therapy (Los Angeles, California) is a mental health startup focused on removing stigmas related to marginalized communities accessing care by matching clients with providers who fit their values such as, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and gender.
• Grapevine Health (Washington, D.C.) educates and engages people in underserved communities about their health through relatable, culturally appropriate, data informed video content.
• K'ept Health (Washington, D.C.) is a woman-focused digital dermatology clinic using AI/ML to provide holistic, culturally competent care.
• knowRX® (Austin, Texas) has created a cloud-based digital healthcare platform that addresses various encounters important to proper therapeutic care.
• Lucia Health Guidelines (San Francisco, California) is an AI-based clinical decision support tool that provides diagnosis and guideline treatment for atrial fibrillation (AFib) at the point of care.
• Omaiven (Austin, Texas) automates the business of healthcare, to help lower the barriers that prevent people from getting the care they need.
• Patient Orator (New York City, New York) is a HIPAA compliant app helping chronically ill patients document changes in their health to bridge existing communication gaps between healthcare professionals and underserved communities.
• Provider Pool (St. Louis, Missouri) is a career building community of temporary healthcare workers. Our workforce management tool allows healthcare organizations to hire these workers on-demand.
• Radical Health (New York City, New York) is a minority women-owned social enterprise that works at the intersection of community health and AI enabled tech to help people understand their health care rights, build trust, and develop self advocacy.
• TQIntelligence's (Atlanta, Georgia) Clarity AI is a talk therapy software that extracts voice biomarkers to measure emotional distress of at-risk youth to improve treatment outcome.
• Violet (New York City, New York) helps the healthcare industry identify and reward culturally competent clinicians.
• Viora Health (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a personalized engagement solution to address social and behavioral determinants of health by disease state.

For more information, contact Rustin Finkler at Village Capital (rustin.finkler@vilcap.com). 

About Village Capital

Village Capital helps entrepreneurs bring big ideas from vision to scale. Our mission is to reinvent the system to back the entrepreneurs of the future. Our vision is a future where business creates equity and long-term prosperity. Since 2009, we have supported more than 1,000 early-stage entrepreneurs through our investment readiness programs. Our affiliated fund, VilCap Investments, has invested in more than 100 program graduates.