Cadence raises $100M Series C after showing AI can prevent 20 strokes a week and save Medicare $2.7M per week

back. It's it's awesome to watch and uh love to see it.

It's great.

Awesome.

Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers, dude.

Have a good one. Let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is in the waiting room, Chris Altek from Cadence. Chris, how you doing?

Great. Hey, Jordy. Hey, John. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming on.

Please welcome to the show.

Introduce yourself. Tell us what you're building and then we'll talk about the round.

Sure. Uh Chris Hchek, founder at Cadence. We are building clinical AI to automate the treatment of chronic disease. Uh, we just announced our series C last week and super excited to be on the show.

How much did you raise?

Start there. Start at the gong.

How much did you raise?

We raised $100 million.

Congratulations.

Humble nine figs. Uh, talk about Yeah. When did you start the company? What's been the progress to date? What what got you to this round?

Yeah. So, so company is 5 years old. Uh, I was privileged to grow up in a family of doctors and I'm I'm married to a doctor, too. I saw how frustrating it is to know what treatment would actually make a patient healthier but not have a system to be able to do it. Uh, and we knew that we could automate the treatment of the most common chronic diseases, heart failure, hypertension, diabetes. Um, and so we set out to build this technology over the last 5 years. We thought it would take 10 years to get to real automation and we're 5 years in and it's going a lot faster than we ever expected. We're uh we have the the the privilege of managing a 100,000 patients now nearly every day uh with a lot of the leading hospital systems in the country um and preventing strokes and heart attacks and helping people get healthier. So, it's it's been super exciting.

Okay. So pick a condition and then walk me through exactly how the product works for a patient and for their you know care provider.

Yeah. So let's take heart failure because that's a super important one. 8 million seniors in the US with heart failure. Those seniors are in in and out of the hospital at a super high rate cost causing costing the US government which ensures these people about $50 billion a year. So precadence less than 10% of these patients in the country are on the right drugs. Getting to the right drugs expands lifespan by 5 to seven years on average. So we've got 90% of people with heart failure in the US. You know, probably your families, my families, our aunts, our uncles, people we know who are living 5 to seven years uh shorter lives because they're not on the right drugs. And it's not because they don't have amazing cardiologists or amazing primary care doctors. is because to get a patient on the right drugs, you need to be adjusting their medications often five to seven times in a year and you need to be looking at their heart rate and their blood pressure as you're doing it and their weight. And so with Cadence, um the physician orders Cadence. Cadence gets the patient a cellular connected blood pressure cuff, a scale, um devices that give us their vitals remotely at home. The patient starts taking their vitals. We have their full medical records, their labs, vitals, allergies, symptoms, everything. And we're using AI to figure out is this patient on the right drugs. If they're not on the right drugs, let's prescribe new medications, adjust current dosages, remove old medications. And we do that with all in an automated fashion with humans in the loop making the final decision on these med changes. So the physician actually doesn't have to do the work. The cadence team and the cadence agents are doing the work on behalf of the physician. So, that's number one. Number two is we're getting their blood pressure and heart rate uh and weight on a daily basis. So, if a patient um has a blood pressure of 200 and it's Saturday night at 9:00 p.m., we have a voice agent that calls the patient within 2 and 1/2 minutes, let also do we need them to see their cardiologist on on on Monday morning. We're catching about 20 strokes a week right now

before the patients know that they're having a stroke

just off of these agents doing symptom triage plus the data we have. Uh so that's number two. And then number three is um we're then coaching the patient on diet, exercise, metadherence, all the little things that require a lot of uh a lot of support on a daily basis. Our average patient is 75 years old to sort of keep them on their care plan. And we had patient in rural North Carolina who uh with heart failure was in and out of the hospital three times before getting on cadence in the last 6 months. Got him on cadence, got him stabilized, got him to to the right meds, and he was playing golf again for the first time in 3 years in his mid70s, which is like, you know, that's that's what we're trying to do here. You got to be like uh a hundred times louder with what you're doing because uh I think yeah it's a it's a total white pill and uh you know actually delivering you know a lot of the a lot of the potential that people have talked about around technology broadly for a long time.

I would I would love some more uh uh information just getting me up to speed on the state of uh the medical devices for monitoring vi vitals. You mentioned a uh an internet connected or cellular connected blood pressure cuff. Uh are is there is there significant transition from the consumer medical devices the Apple watches the Fitbits are those relevant or for these patients are they getting a separate suite of medical devices for vital monitoring?

Yeah, it's one of the exciting places of the next five years. So today it's a separate suite. These are FDA cleared devices

that give you blood pressure in a medically accurate way or blood blood glucose you know CGM etc. Um, so we're using medical devices today. Hopefully if um, you know, if the wearables and various Apple watches of the world get to medical grade accuracy or get the data in a way that we can use it, then we'll be able to use those. But today, you couldn't use those devices to make clinical decisions. That is, you know, part of the exciting place here is we're managing 100,000 patients today.

There's easily 10 million patients in the US who could benefit from this, if not 20 or 30 million. Um, and we've just got more data, more sensors

going out, you know, via wearables, and we need a clinical intelligence layer who can actually

again take clinical action based off these data and these signals and turn it into longer, healthier lives for patients.

Okay,

nominative determinism here. Alternative checkup.

Okay. Yeah, I like it.

I'll check.

I think we missed a C in the last name. We need to update the Chiron. Uh, but I want to know more about the devices. Let me let uh so uh you mentioned blood pressure monitoring, blood glucose monitoring. Uh those I've been aware of since I was a kid. Uh you go into the doctor's office, they put maybe they do it manually. Uh so I understand that we're on the track of internet connected more regular testing and vital monitoring, but is there a new maybe in the last decade uh metric that doctors are monitoring? Is there a new is there a new number that's popping up and proving to be uh indicative of health performance or drug dosage?

You we're not we're we're not there yet.

Okay.

Um in terms of HRV or you know hemodynamics with heart failure like how effectively is your blood is your blood is your blood is your heart pumping? How much fluid retention do you have? We're actually starting to get closer. So, Cadence is testing a bunch of devices that measure these alternative metrics and then we're comparing them to the standard clinical of care. But just off of blood pressure, if you, you know, take that one right now, most patients, you get it four times a year. If you go to the doctor four times a year, if you're, you were me, you get it once a year. When you go to the doctor once a year, we're getting it on average 22 days a month for patients. And so, the level of clinical insight you get from, you know, 22 days of data versus four times a year, um, is is pretty dramatic. So, I would say a big a big part of this is is turning um what was previously episodic clinical infrastructure into an everyday 24/7 experience for patients. And just then and there you could take

likely hundred billion out of US healthcare costs uh just on very conservative basis. Today, Cadence saves Medicare about $2.7 million per week

by preventing avoidable hospitalizations. And we're still very small scale relative to what this can become.

Yeah. What is the key to scaling? Do you need to work of healthare?

I like this dynamic. You say something incredible. I say a joke. John asks a serious question and we could just go around like this. We could just go around like this forever. No, but but I but I love I love the focus on on savings. It's incredible.

Uh wait, sorry. Uh go to market distribution. How do we 10x that? How do we 100x that? Are we going to insurance providers, insurers, hospitals, individual doctors, individual patients? Like what are the key funnel steps for you?

Yeah. So, so key funnel step number one is how many health systems are you working with, hospital systems you working with? So, we work with 21 of the leaders in the country today from we announced actually Duke and Texas Health last week. Uh we work with some of the largest health systems in every state, Orwell and Michigan. So how do we go from 21 hospital systems to 100 hospital systems? Uh so that's step number one. Step number two is effectively working with those physicians and their patients. You know cadence is a full endto-end clinical solution. So we are working directly with physicians working directly with patients. Our AI agents are interacting with both. Um so that's sort of step two. And then step three is continuing to work with payers. So today we work with two of the largest payers in the country. We'll work very closely with CMS and and the US government to ensure uh that there's positive ROI uh for payers. So those are the sort of big three expansion

uh expansion motions for us. We're only at 3% of the eligible patients within the hospital theos health systems that we are today. So you know as this becomes the standard of care in the US um this should hopefully be able to help a lot of people.

Amazing.

Jordan, anything else?

Incredible.

I have one last question. Can you talk about the General Catalyst partnership? Uh they're an investor, but they also own a hospital network. I don't know if that deal's been completed. Has that been helpful? Is are you the synergy that we were hearing about when that news initially broke? Walk me through that.

Yes. So, General Catalyst uh acquired a nonfor-profit hospital system called Suma Health. Yeah.

That closed uh earlier this year. Um, it's a really exciting testing ground for new technologies inside of uh important community health systems and and SUMA Health is both the the provider in their community as well as one of the big payers in their community. So, they can benefit from these kinds of services multiple different ways.

Um, and it's one of,

you know, several examples of of really fast modernization of US healthcare that's happening right now with AI. You know, I think people people think of healthcare as a lagard industry that's always slow to adopt technology. And when you look at AI, it's definitely one of the leaders in in adoption of AI today. And then on on Cadence's side, what we're really excited about is a lot of AI has been pointed towards automating back office tasks, billing, rev cycle, uh, call centers, etc. We're actually using AI to deliver clinical care. And so, it's not about, you know, AI to replace people. It's about AI to