July 24, 2024

In and out

Hi there,

In 2021, fintech and digital health were on 🔥. 

But the private markets are incredibly vibe driven and right now, they're out of favor.

Our recent State of Fintech and State of Digital Health reports show the decline. 

Fintech deals declined 23% YoY and digital health deals were down 40% YoY in the quarter.

As we highlighted last week, the surge of fintech unicorns in 2021 has all but disappeared.

Where are we seeing signs of life?

In digital health:

• IPOs: AI-driven platforms were the highlight here, with Tempus (precision medicine) and XtalPi (drug R&D) going public in Q2. 
• Fat checks: Average deal size in 2024 is $16.7M — up 40% from 2023 — driven by a migration to middle and later-stage deals away from the early stage.

In fintech: 

• Crypto & blockchain: Startups here are getting renewed focus, snagging nearly one-third of the top 10 seed and top 10 Series A deals in Q2. 
• Big US deals: Nine of the 10 biggest deals in the US were worth $100M or more, the most since Q2’22.

And of course, in the broader venture space, AI is what’s hot. 

28% of VC dollars now go to AI startups — the highest quarterly share on record. 

Fine dining

Companies developing large language models like GPT-4 want data.

As these companies quickly exhaust what’s publicly available, they’re looking for proprietary information sources to feed their hungry models.

OpenAI is most aggressively licensing content from news publishers and others.

It recently inked a 5-year deal with News Corp for a reported $250M.

Check out the licensing deals done by OpenAI and other big tech players in this report. 

Walking on sunshine

GenAI is top of mind for insurers like Cigna, Sun Life, and Munich Re.

And it’s not just a long-term idea — some are already using it and seeing results.

For example, Sun Life deployed the tech in contact centers and is seeing increased productivity. Kevin Strain, Sun Life’s President and CEO, discussed this on their earnings call, as can be seen below.

Learn more about genAI use cases in insurance in this research brief.

You are the champion, my friend

Embedded finance solutions help companies integrate financial tools into their platforms.

For example, they could allow a retailer to offer you product insurance or buy now, pay later options at check-out.

As companies across industries seek to improve customer engagement and loyalty, these solutions are gaining steam — but which ones should strategy teams prioritize now? 

CBI customers can find out by digging into the “champion” quadrant of our embedded finance market ranking (sneak preview below).

Industry Standard

Axios. Aaron Weitzman (@AxiosAaron) discusses mid- and late-stage activity in digital health using CB Insights research.

Healthcare Dive. Emily Olsen (@emily__olsen) dives into digital health deal sizes and quotes CB Insights managing analyst Ja Lee.

TechCrunch. Mary Ann Azevedo (@bayareawriter) covers Clio’s $900M round and cites CB Insights data.

I love you. 

Anand 

@asanwal 

P.S. Our State of AI Q2’24 Report will drop soon — and our analyst will be digging into the data behind it live on July 30. Register today to save your spot.

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