Excited to announce our investment alongside Quiet Capital, Mucker Capital, Fika Ventures, Global Founders Capital, SaaS Ventures and Founders First in the $3.8M seed round of HeyRenee — your personal care concierge. HeyRenee is a first-ever digital healthcare assistant focused especially on the elderly, especially those with multiple chronic diseases. Tau Ventures is an AI-first fund in Silicon Valley investing primarily in seed but we occasionally take earlier or later bets when we see immense promise. The company was founded in 2021 and impressed us with (1) a strong need, (2) building an execution-focused team, and (3) creating a differentiated product.
1) The Need
HeyRenee is playing squarely in three megatrends.
One, aging society:
Two, rising costs in chronic conditions:
Three, seniors have adopted technology en masse and looking increasingly to manage their life through it (at least anecdotally, not always willingly but lacking better permanent alternatives):
2) The Team
HeyRenee is founded by Nick Desai and Dr Renee Dua who are also life partners. They were previously the cofounders of Heal, which has raised just over $160M from seed in 2014 to series D in 2020. Nick is a serial entrepreneur having built venture-funded companies in online weight loss coaching, social media and identity management. Renee has served as Chief of Medicine at Valley Presbyterian and Simi Valley Hospitals. She has also taught medicine at UCLA and built a nephrology practice in SoCal. We think Nick and Renee are exceptional founders and respect much of what they have achieved at Heal, including winning customer contracts with 20+ providers and 50+ corporations, and hiring and managing 150 doctors across 11 states.
3) The Product
HeyRenee will be building an assistant to help seniors with major tasks around healthcare — schedule appointments, take the right medications timely, get services etc. Given the mind-boggling bureaucracy in US healthcare ($1T i.e., 33% of expenditure is paperwork), the perpetual and arguably justified dissatisfaction with payors especially, and the overall confusion on knowing what to do, we think that any solution that helps seniors navigate healthcare even incrementally better will get adoption.
We are honored and excited to be part of HeyRenee’s journey, using technology to solve a big problem.
Originally published on “Data Driven Investor,” am happy to syndicate on other platforms. I am the Managing Partner and Cofounder of Tau Ventures with 20 years in Silicon Valley across corporates, own startup, and VC funds. These are purposely short articles focused on practical insights (I call it gl;dr — good length; did read). Many of my writings are at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amgarg/detail/recent-activity/posts and I would be stoked if they get people interested enough in a topic to explore in further depth. If this article had useful insights for you comment away and/or give a like on the article and on the Tau Ventures’ LinkedIn page, with due thanks for supporting our work. All opinions expressed here are my own.
