Houston health tech company raises $7.85M series A led by local VC

green for growth

Houston-based Kare Technologies has raised fresh funds to spur its national expansion. Image courtesy of Kare

A Houston-based health tech company has scored fresh funds from a Houston venture group to fuel its growth and to expand nationally.

KARE Technologies, a digital labor marketplace for health care workers, raised a $7.85 million series A investment round led by Houston-based Golden Section Ventures.

"The KARE team are well known in senior care and the caring industry at large," says Dougal Cameron, general partner at GSV, in a news release. "They are experts in their field and know this problem well. Their care for the industry and knowledge in the space clearly shows in the company's rapid adoption. They are providing a needed solution to an extremely important industry for our society."

The digital platform offers senior facilities and qualified caregivers a platform to post and accept work for hire. The company's founder Charles Turner had the idea for the technology after seeing hospitals struggle to get care workers during the 2017 hurricanes. Again, with the rise of COVID-19, that need for health care staff became even more apparent.

"The biggest issue we're facing — and this is even a non-COVID world — is staffing," Turner previously told InnovationMap. According to the release, 82 percent of caring communities that face chronic staffing challenges.

The growing company will use the funds to support its growth and national expansion.

"It feels good when you build something that the marketplace loves and helps alleviate a major crisis that so many of our operator customers are dealing with," says Turner, who serves as KARE's CEO, in the release. "We are eternally grateful that GSV has understood our vision from our very first day and has been such a committed partner to help fuel our growth."

Golden Section Ventures supports early-stage software startups with B2B applications. The VC fund recently launched its venture studio concept.

"We partner with founders who have built creative solutions that solve real customer pain points. Charles Turner, Bridget Kaselak and their team are great examples of this," says Adam Day, general partner at GSV, says in the release. "They lived the customer problem then pioneered a set of solutions that help their clients address the chronic and widespread issue of labor shortages in the caring industry."

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Jim Havelka of InformAI, Christa Westheimer of New Stack Ventures, and Charles Turner of Kare Technologies. Courtesy photos

3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

Editor's note: In the week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three innovators recently making headlines — from health tech founders to a venture capital rising star.

Jim Havelka, founder and CEO of InformAI

Jim Havelka, founder and CEO of InformAI, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to discuss the difference his technology can make on the health care industry. Photo courtesy of InformAI

InformAI is providing solutions for data optimizations in health care — something that'll allow for better diagnoses and treatment. Jim Havelka shares on the Houston Innovators Podcast last week that his company's success is due to being headquartered in Houston and tied to the Texas Medical Center. The company's team works out of JLABS @ TMC as well as TMC Innovation Institute.

"Those relationships have been very helpful in getting data to build these particular products," Havelka says. "Just the Texas Medical Center alone has roughly 10 million patient encounters every year. The ability to get access to data and, equally important, the medical experts has been a tremendous benefit to InformAI." Click here to read more and stream the podcast.

Christa Westheimer, venture fellow at New Stack Ventures

Need an in with a venture capital firm? This Houstonian has an idea. Photo courtesy

As a venture fellow, Christa Westheimer — who's a student at Rice University — works hard to find startups working on the next great thing. And she realizes there are so many Houston startups seeking funding, so she has some advice: get in touch.

"During my tenure as a venture fellow, I have been sifting through online resources — from Crunchbase and AngelList to LinkedIn — with the hopes of finding a really neat startup that would earn an investment from New Stack Ventures," she writes in a guest column for InnovationMap. Click here to read more.

Charles Turner, founder of Kare Technologies

Charles Turner founded Kare Technologies on the heels of a crisis — and the pandemic has accelerated the company's growth. Photo courtesy of Kare

Charles Turner saw an inefficiency in senior health care staffing — even before the industry was rocked by a pandemic. He founded Kare Technologies to use software to address this problem. In light of COVID-19, the need for better staffing solutions grew across industries and Kare expanded its features to reach hotel and restaurant workers.

"We'd always plan on doing this, and with the advent of COVID we accelerate our development on the hospitality side," Turner says. Click here to read more.

Houston-based Kare Technologies optimizes staffing for caregivers, and COVID-19 has allowed them to grow faster than they expected. Image courtesy of Kare

Houston-based senior care startup accelerates gameplan amid pandemic

startup that kares

Houston-based acute care startup Kare Technologies has yet to waste a good crisis.

The company, which offers senior facilities and qualified caregivers a platform to post and accept work for hire, was born out of founder Charles Turner's experience in Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma in 2017.

Turner first entered the senior care industry as a facilities developer and watched in 2017 as staff in Houston and Florida struggled through the storms.

"In both of those situations, my buildings were fine but my employees were [flooded in] and they couldn't get to work. We had to rely on the staff — especially in Harvey — that was in the building when the hurricane hit. We had to rely on them for four days straight and they didn't sleep for four days," Turner says. " We were by ourselves."

In 2019, Turner launched Kare as a way for facilities to work through everyday staffing challenges and natural disasters alike. The platform matches senior-care facilities with vetted and credentialed staff who are eager to pick up extra shifts in the industry with growing demand.

"The biggest issue we're facing — and this is even a non-COVID world — is staffing," Turner says about his industry.

Charles Turner founded Kare Technologies on the heels of a crisis — and the pandemic has accelerated the company's growth. Photo courtesy of Kare

According to Turner, many frontline workers (which include certified nursing assistants, certified medication aides, licensed vocational nurses, licensed professional nurses, and the likes) are required to take on a second job to make ends meet. However, those jobs are often not in the senior-care field.

"They are very missional, they do love caring for seniors," he says of senior caregivers. "And so there's tension. 'I can stay in working senior care, or I can make $5 more an hour working at Amazon or something like that.' But they don't love that."

Too, the platform allows facilities to pay a fee for using the marketplace, instead of paying an expensive staffing agency that takes a cut from every placement or hire.

Amid the pandemic, the company expanded its features to reach hotel and restaurant workers.

"We'd always plan on doing this, and with the advent of COVID we accelerate our development on the hospitality side," Turner says.

Thanks to Houston-based Golden Section Financial's $1 million in-kind software services grant program, Kare was able to onboard a new team of senior developers to add the features and functionality that would allow recently laid off or furloughed hospitality workers to put their skills to use. Just as caregivers could use the platform to find jobs that fit their skill sets, these workers could find work they were qualified for as cooks, receptionists, waiters, and housekeepers at senior facilities.

The grant also allowed the company to add important features to the platform to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in hard-hit senior care facilities. These features would limit the number of buildings workers could bounce around from and encouraged workers to stay within a smaller network.

Currently the Kare is being used by several thousand workers and hundreds of senior care facilities, Turner says. He anticipates that the platform will be available in all major U.S. cities by the end of the year, and will be exploring international opportunities by 2022.

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Baylor College of Medicine launches VC fund to invest in biotech startups

fresh funding

Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine just unveiled a new venture capital fund that backs early-stage biotech startups—and it’s already made its first investment.

BCM Legacy Fund I, funded by philanthropies, invested an undisclosed amount in Houston biotech startup Nemea Therapeutics. Nemea, a spinout of the Baylor College of Medicine and Germany’s Lead Discovery Center, is developing an oral drug to treat metastatic triple-negative breast cancer that no longer responds to currently available therapies.

This type of aggressive cancer spreads from the breast to other areas of the body, such as the bones, liver, lungs or brain. Roughly 38,000 to 57,000 Americans are diagnosed each year with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. One study showed about half of patients survive past the one-year mark following diagnosis and about one-third survive two years.

“Baylor College of Medicine’s laboratories produce discoveries with the potential to change patients’ lives, and too many of them stall where academic funding ends and private investment has not yet begun,” Dr. Jakub Tolar, president, CEO and executive dean of the Baylor College of Medicine, said in a press release. “The BCM Legacy Fund fills that gap, giving our scientists a path to advance their discoveries to patients.”

The National Institutes of Health awards more than $36 billion per year for biomedical research in the U.S., Baylor said. But some biomedical discoveries “never leave the starting line because they don’t yet fit the economics of venture capital,” the college said.

“The forefront of a new model”

The BCM Legacy Fund aggregates philanthropic capital from private foundations and donor-advised funds. It then invests in startups so they can move beyond that starting line and into later-stage investment rounds. The Greater Houston Community Foundation is the fund’s philanthropic partner.

“It’s exciting to be on the forefront of a new model for philanthropic capital,” said Houston entrepreneur and investor Burton Hanson, managing partner of the fund.

“Not only do we hope to solve a real problem by advancing these therapies to the patients who need them most, but we also hope this model will inspire others in the city and beyond toward philanthropic creativity and a posture of ‘I sacrifice; we win.’”

The fund expects to invest in about 15 early-stage startups over a five-year span. Baylor declined to divulge the amount of money in the fund and the size of the investment in Nemea.

Nemea’s “world-class chemistry”

Hanson oversees the Baylor fund alongside Chicago investor Steve Lehmann, who led the University of Chicago’s Innovation Fund.

Lehmann said Nemea, the fund’s first portfolio company, “has world-class chemistry, Baylor biology, and patients with no good options. Our job is to fund the experiments that carry it to the next handoff, so that industry and later-stage investors can take it from there.”

Based at Houston’s massive Texas Medical Center, Nemea plans to start clinical trials next year in collaboration with Baylor’s Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center.

Nemea previously received $9 million from the Lead Discovery Center and a $1.6 million grant from Baylor. Last year, the startup said it was seeking $25 million to $30 million in seed and Series A funding.

Debra McCoy of Houston, a former managing director at BlackRock and former partner at Bain & Co., and Paul Thomas, co-founder and CEO of Spring-based benefits manager Luscinia Health, sit on the Baylor fund’s governing board. Dr. Paul Klotman, former president, CEO and executive dean of Baylor, is a senior strategic adviser.

How does the fund find investment targets?

The Baylor Legacy Fund relies on two tools to help unearth early-stage biotech startups:

  • High-resolution “innovation maps” of research institutions. These maps surface hidden clusters of innovation, identify rising-star researchers and tie pockets of “innovation supply” at Baylor to areas of “innovation demand” in biotech.
  • AI-enhanced due diligence. AI agents assist with due diligence of early-stage biotech startups. The fund says the platform “distills the frameworks we’ve developed over a decade of teaching and investing into a flexible … diligence environment.”

MD Anderson unveils $3.4B expansion with two new Houston cancer care facilities

major expansion

The cutting edge of cancer-fighting technology and science is getting even sharper after MD Anderson announced last week that it will open two new facilities in the Texas Medical Center within the next five years. Inspiration Tower and Prism will expand MD Anderson’s annual patient load in the TMC to 250,000 annually and will incorporate a variety of new techniques.

The $3.4 billion project will add 2 million square feet to MD Anderson's TMC footprint, bringing its total campus size to 22 million square feet by 2032. Located at the corner of Fannin Street and Holcombe Boulevard, the cancer center says the two new facilities will serve as its new "front door" to the TMC.

“Every detail of these buildings, from the technology to the treatment rooms, was designed around our patients who will receive their care in them and our employees who will work in them. The facilities will serve as a physical representation of hope for the patients and their families who will walk through the doors,” Dr. Jeffrey E. Lee, president ad interim of UT MD Anderson, said in a news release. “Inspiration Tower and Prism are the future of cancer care, and we are grateful for the longstanding support and guidance we’ve received from the UT System Board of Regents to bring these projects to life. These facilities are part of the most impactful capital expansion in UT MD Anderson’s history.”

Prism is especially exciting as it will represent fully half of the linear accelerator treatment in the TMC. Linear accelerator is a radiation treatment that uses magnetically charged fields to deliver targeted external radiation therapy, like shooting cancer with a rail gun. The treatment is safer and has fewer side effects than older radiation treatments.

In addition, Prism will contain 12 MRI machines, four CT scanners, two PET-CT units, 18 radiation vaults and seven radiation simulators. Patient comfort has also been put at a premium with multiple gardens and roof overlooks.

“Every patient we treat deserves an environment that reflects the excellence of the care they receive at UT MD Anderson,” Chris McKee, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at UT MD Anderson, added in the release. “Our new facilities will be innovative, agile, adaptable and beautiful, and they will allow us to care for more patients, more effectively – in an environment that enhances healing and well-being. We are building for our future and for every patient who will be counting on us.”

Prism is slated to open in 2030.

Inspiration Tower will have 25 floors of surgical, diagnostic, and treatment services. At 1.4 million square feet, it’s currently expected to be the largest cancer-specific treatment facility in the United States. The tower will be divided into units for specific types of cancer, making it easy to integrate the advancing research being done all over Houston.

Like Prism, Inspiration Tower is specifically designed to offer comfort and reassurance, with more garden space, terraces, and beautiful scenery to ease patient distress. It is expected to open in 2032.

Tesla will pull the plug on Cybertruck production at Texas factory in 2027

Tesla Talk

Tesla’s Cybertruck, the hulking, stainless-steel pickup that inspired devotion and derision with its science-fiction looks, will cease production next year.

CEO Elon Musk announced the model’s demise Friday, November 6, with a curt post on X, his social media site, simply noting production of the vehicle “will be winding down” around the middle of 2027 at its facility outside Austin, Texas. Musk said the move was to allow increased production of its Cybercab robotaxi.

For the Cybertruck, a pet project of Musk who insisted it was Tesla’s best product, it marks an unceremonious end to one of the auto industry’s most ballyhooed debuts.

“Few vehicles in history have generated as much attention,” said Armen Hareyan, whose Torque News site covers autos. “The Cybertruck became a cultural symbol – loved, mocked and impossible to ignore.”

The Cybertruck rolled onto the scene in a dramatic unveiling in 2019, when a Tesla designer hurled a metal ball at the vehicle to demonstrate its supposedly unbreakable glass, only to see it shatter. He repeated the stunt on another window of the truck only to shatter that one, too.

Even as some critics scoffed, Musk was steadfast.

“I just wanted to make a futuristic battle tank — something that looks like it could come out of ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘Aliens’ or something like that but was also highly functional,” he told Automotive News. He called it “a better sports car than a Porsche 911” and “a better truck than an F-150.”

It struck some as the perfect vehicular reflection of the brash, convention-busting Musk.

“A really controversial vehicle unveiled by a controversial individual into a market where none of the electric trucks have been able to really capture demand,” said Spencer Penn, a former Tesla executive who left the company before the Cybertruck’s launch and now heads software developer LightSource.

Penn remembered watching the unveiling and feeling initially revolted by the sight of the Cybertruck, calling its appearance “madness.” But the more he looked at it, the more his opinion changed. He signed up for a pre-sale reservation, though ended up not getting a Cybertruck when Musk’s promises of a price tag under $40,000 went unmet and the first trucks sold for double or more. Penn called the Cybertruck part of Tesla’s adventurous spirit that drives innovation.

“Some of these bets work and some of these bets don’t,” he said.

While the decision to end Cybertruck production may be driven by sales realities, it's also a reflection of Tesla’s shift to autonomous vehicles, on which Musk is betting the company’s future.

Musk once forecast he’d make 250,000 Cybertrucks a year. Kelley Blue Book estimated Tesla sold just 20,237 of the vehicles last year, down about half from the year prior. Sales through the end of September this year were down another 28%, according to Kelley Blue Book.

If the imposing, sharp-angled, dystopian appearance of the Cybertruck weren’t enough to turn many potential buyers away, Musk did so himself by allying with a panoply of right-wing figures, most notably U.S. President Donald Trump. He alienated some customers as his image morphed from eccentric innovator to polarizing force trading his billions for political influence.

Once-passionate Tesla drivers rushed to sell off their cars, or slapped stickers on the bumper declaring, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” Organizers staged demonstrations outside Tesla showrooms and urged investors to dump shares of the company’s stock. Anger spilled into violence, with Molotov cocktails hurled at Tesla vehicles, charging stations set ablaze, and dealerships covered in graffiti.

Lovers of the Cybertruck became targets, too, subjected to shouts of “Nazi!” and extended middle fingers.

Ross Blankenship is one of them. When he first laid eyes on the Cybertruck, he felt transported to a world from his childhood, when he would play “Halo,” the sci-fi video game. He had to have it.

“I had that sort of child in me wanting to be part of something cool that would change the future of automotive,” Blankenship said in a call from his Cybertruck as he drove through Sunnyside, Colorado. Even as Blankenship found he agreed with Musk on politics, he hated seeing a vehicle he loved turned into a political symbol. “I never bought it for any other reason than the fascination with the future technology of trucks … so that was a little heartbreaking.”

He would buy another Cybertruck again in a heartbeat, calling its end “a sad moment.”

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