Early-stage healthcare startups are facing a funding cliff

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The 2023 cal­en­dar year ends as it be­gan: It’s still a hard time to be a health­care start­up.

Af­ter 2021’s flood of mon­ey, in­vestors have been pump­ing the brakes. That pause forced some com­pa­nies to shift their fo­cus from get­ting big­ger at all costs to fo­cus­ing on prof­it.

“A few years ago, the pres­sure was just grow, grow, grow, we will give you more mon­ey to grow. You’ll wor­ry about be­com­ing prof­itable lat­er,” Greg Yap, a health­care and life sci­ences in­vestor at Men­lo Ven­tures said. “Now the fo­cus is on, ‘If I give you mon­ey now, can you grow to a stage where you don’t have to go raise more mon­ey so that you can ac­tu­al­ly af­ford to run the busi­ness breakeven or prof­itable?’”

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