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

Our recent Neko Health visit prompted us to re-visit our consumer health thesis. This week, we published the first part of a three part series on consumer health diagnostics 👇 1️⃣ Early diagnosis enables better health outcomes. Neko Health is a great example, bringing scalable preventative screenings to consumers (to those who can pay £299 - more on that further down!). There are many more companies in this consumer diagnostic category like Daye and Oxford Cancer Analytics. We will be exploring these in the coming weeks 🏥💡 2️⃣ The Neko experience prides itself on cardiovascular and skin health. But there are many more tests beyond this, including: eye pressure, grip strength, and tissue composition. There is value in this 'point-in-time' snapshot, but the true unlock is in the trend data which Neko will observe if people rebook scans on a yearly basis. Early Neko data suggests 76% users rebook... 🫀 📊 3️⃣ The data moat is going to be huge. Neko is essentially building the primary care infrastructure of the future. Beyond the data and diagnostics, the consumer experience is very high quality (I know that building design is besides the point, but it also kind of isn't... they've transformed preventative health into something to be enjoyed. There's bias here as I know I feel particularly accountable when I see my health data) 📈 🤖 4️⃣ There are two BIG pushbacks to this approach. (1) Encouraging mass-screening can cause health anxiety for low-level problems and can therefore cause more harm than good at the aggregate level. We cover this in the note but believe that this misses the core point of preventative health. To us, the good outweighs the harms. (2) The £299 price point is inaccessible for the majority of people. Health equity has always been important to us and we believe there is a long way to go before many consumer diagnostics become truly accessible and equitable 😟 💰 5️⃣ At Eka, we back health companies which enable a move from a reactive treatment-led healthcare model to a more proactive and accessible system. We're lucky to have backed some incredible companies in Consumer Health including Oxford Cancer Analytics, Flok Health, Isla Health, and others 💼💊 As always, feel free to reach out if you're building here and keen to chat ☕️ Camilla Dolan Jon Coker Hamish Law Alicia Walker Anna Westall P.S. article is in the comments 📝 #HealthcareInnovation #ConsumerHealth #EarlyDiagnosis #HealthTech #Investment #FutureOfHealthcare

Congratulations to Karl Bach and Archy de Berker on their seed round led by Accel . We first invested in their pre-seed round alongside Picus Capital last year and have been blown away by what they have achieved in such a short period of time. This is a properly complex problem and the speed at which they have built a network of 15,000 connected assets and started generating real cash for the underlying home owner is extremely impressive. Looking forward to watching them build from here! https://lnkd.in/e-ynhcDi

At Eka, we are firm believers that consumers drive change in Sustainability and Health. We’re on the lookout for founder(s) who are building the next generational consumer company  ⬇️ We wrote about the state of the UK consumer in our latest newsletter (below). As part of this work, we are digging into what it takes to build the the next wave of companies and will be releasing a larger report in the coming weeks alongside our updated mapping.    We've already backed some incredible consumer-facing companies including Believe in Science Ltd., Byway, hylo athletics, Jude, Paired, Runna, and Urban Jungle Insurance. Now, we’re on the lookout for the next outlier founder(s) in Impact. Reach out if you’re building, or you know another outstanding founder who might be a fit 👋   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