Nelson Advisors: Is Australian HealthTech having a renaissance moment?

Nelson Advisors

6 minutes ago

11 min read

Is Australian HealthTech having a renaissance moment?

Mostly yes, with a caveat that matters. In nine months Australia has produced a US$1.15 billion healthtech sale, a US$900 million AI scribe and a string of large rounds, but the new wave is also being tested by scale, regulation and the pull of the US market.

Heidi Health: the breakout

If you want one company to anchor the renaissance argument, it is Heidi. On 22 September the Melbourne-founded AI clinical assistant closed a US$100 million Series C led by Blackbird, plus a US$240 million growth facility from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, for US$340 million of new financing in total. The round values the company at US$900 million, almost double its previous price tag. Twelve months earlier, its Series B had valued it at US$465 million.

The usage numbers explain the price. Heidi says its platform has supported more than 175 million patient visits, up from 73 million at Series B, and now handles 2.8 million visits a week across 190 countries and 110 languages. Annual recurring revenue grew from US$1 million to US$50 million in two years, a level it reached in April 2026. Those figures are the company's own, so treat them as claims until audited, but the direction of travel is hard to dispute.

The interesting part is what Heidi does next. It began as an AI scribe that writes up a consultation so the clinician does not have to. It now describes itself as an "AI Care Partner" and is pushing towards what it calls supervised agentic workflows: drafting referrals, surfacing evidence at the point of care and chasing administrative follow-up. Its evidence product, launched in March 2026, has already answered more than 10 million queries. This matters because ambient scribing is crowded and easy to copy, and the durable value will sit in whatever the software can safely do after the note is written.

The financing structure is also telling. CEO Tom Kelly told Forbes Australia that most of the spending is going into new markets such as France and Germany, and that the company should be cash-flow neutral by the end of next year. The General Catalyst facility funds sales and marketing in return for a share of revenue from the customers it wins, which lets Heidi grow without giving up more equity. Forbes counts Heidi as Australia's fourth new unicorn of 2026, and Blackbird, which backed it at seed in 2021, calls it the fastest-growing company in its portfolio.

The honest caveat is competition. Microsoft (which owns Nuance), Abridge and a long tail of scribe start-ups are all chasing the same clinicians. Heidi's bet is that trust, breadth of languages and an early lead in agentic features will keep it ahead.

Eucalyptus: the exit that changed the conversation

If Heidi is the promise, Eucalyptus is the proof. In February, US-listed Hims & Hers agreed to buy the Sydney telehealth group for up to US$1.15 billion, roughly A$1.6 billion. About US$240 million was payable in cash at closing, with the rest made up of deferred payments and earnouts stretching to early 2029, so the headline number is a ceiling rather than a cheque. The deal completed in June.

What makes it a landmark is the shape of the business. Eucalyptus was founded in 2019 by Tim Doyle, Charlie Gearside, Benny Kleist and Alexey Mitko and built a family of direct-to-consumer brands: Pilot for men's health, Juniper for weight loss, Kin for fertility and Software for skin. Hims & Hers said it had served more than 775,000 customers, and Juniper was already live in Australia, the UK, Germany and Japan. Backers included Blackbird, Airtree and Bond, and one investor's analysis reported that hundreds of employees shared more than A$300 million in what may be the largest employee share payout in Australian start-up history. Treat that figure as reported, not confirmed.

The irony is that the biggest private trade sale of a VC-backed Australian start-up was not enterprise software or a foundation model. It was a telehealth company selling GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and hair-loss treatments, which is a useful corrective to any tidy story about deep technology leading the revival.

It also carries a warning. Eucalyptus's marketing drew scrutiny: the Australia and New Zealand Academy for Eating Disorders raised concerns that some promotions could reach people who did not need the medication, and regulators have stressed that prescribing decisions remain the clinician's responsibility. The exit's afterlife is instructive too. On 31 August the Pilot brand was retired and relaunched under the Hims name in Australia. An Australian success story now has a US parent, which is how many Australian exits end, and a fair question for the ecosystem is how much of the next chapter gets built here.

Everlab: preventative care and the next wave

Eucalyptus sold treatment on demand. Everlab is betting on the opposite end of the care curve. The Melbourne company, founded in 2023, raised A$65 million in a Series A in June, led by Airtree with Plural, Left Lane Capital, b2venture and a handful of angels including Australian Test captain Pat Cummins. It followed a A$15 million seed round less than a year earlier.

The pitch is that primary care is built to treat illness, not prevent it. Everlab's app pulls diagnostics, doctors, specialists, prescriptions and wearable data into one longitudinal record, then uses AI to flag risk early and coordinate what happens next. Members get whole-body testing, a personal doctor and a lifelong health plan on a tiered subscription. The company says it has completed more than 40,000 consultations for 20,000 patients and processed over 21 million biomarker results, and that more than a quarter of members had findings flagged that the existing system had not identified. Corporate customers include Boston Consulting Group, BHP and Bain.

Everlab is a useful marker of the moment for three reasons. It is a Series A company raising at a scale that was rare here a few years ago, its first international target is the UK, and its investor list mixes Australian, European and American funds from the start. The company frames the UK as the entry to a $10 trillion global consumer healthcare market.

The risks are the usual ones for preventative medicine. Early detection can create as much anxiety and follow-up testing as it does benefit, and the evidence that whole-body screening improves outcomes is contested. The 25 per cent flagged figure is also the company's own, and "flagged" is not the same as "clinically significant". Everlab will need independent outcome data to turn a promising membership model into a lasting one.

Harrison.ai: the complication in the story

No honest renaissance story skips Harrison.ai. The Sydney company builds AI that reads chest X-rays, CT scans and pathology slides, and in February 2025 it raised US$112 million, about A$179 million, in a Series C co-led by Aware Super, ECP and Horizons Ventures. The federal government's National Reconstruction Fund added A$32 million with the explicit aim of keeping the company's operations based in Australia.

The business, though, has taken a sharper turn. Earlier this year Harrison.ai told Australian staff some roles would go, and this month the ABC reported that the company is pivoting to a US business model, including an AI-enabled teleradiology service called Frontier, which is a first move into delivering clinical services rather than selling software. The reporting also raised questions about how independent the affiliated US practice is.

This is the ecosystem's central tension in a single company. Capital and talent are plentiful, but the largest healthcare market in the world sits across the Pacific, and it can pull operations, and jobs, in its direction. A renaissance that is measured in valuations can coexist with a shrinking Australian headcount. Whether that matters depends on whether you count success by where the company is headquartered or where its people work, and public investors in the National Reconstruction Fund are entitled to have a view.

Big Picture Medical and Lanas: the plumbing

Headline rounds go to the products clinicians see. A quieter part of the story is the infrastructure that lets any of it work, and two very different companies show it.

Big Picture Medical is a Sydney and London company that has spent more than a decade on a simple problem: healthcare data loses structure and meaning as it moves between organisations. Its answer is a modular layer it calls Blocks, which it describes as a nervous system beneath healthcare, and its website argues that model capability is no longer the constraint on healthcare AI, infrastructure is. The company's roots are in eye care, where it linked optometrists to GPs and hospital ophthalmology departments and took part in a A$12 million project on AI-assisted referral decisionsback in 2020. It is now reported to be raising around $10 million and courting US strategic investors. That is a small round next to Heidi's, but it points at the same gap: agentic AI can only act safely on data that is structured, connected and trustworthy.

Lanas Healthcare Technology is the incumbent end of the spectrum, and the company is a useful

reminder that not all of this activity is start-up driven. Lanas is headquartered in Dublin and was launched in November 2025 by Howard Beggs, founder of the electronic health record supplier Clanwilliam, backed by private equity firm TA Associates with more than US$115 million of committed acquisition funding. It began with annual revenue above US$120 million, more than 1.5 million clinical users and customers in over 20 countries, and its stated goal is to triple in size through organic growth and acquisitions.

Its Australian and New Zealand footprint is the quiet backbone of the local system. HealthLink connects more than 15,000 medical organisations and carries over 100 million clinical messages a year; Toniq PMR runs in more than 950 New Zealand pharmacies; and Toniq 1Chart supports over 3.4 million medication administrations a month across more than 10,000 aged care beds.

Why this belongs in a renaissance story: private equity buying and consolidating unglamorous software is a sign of confidence in the long-term economics of the sector. It also means the start-ups and the incumbents are converging. The scribes and agents need clean data and integrations; the integration layer wants the intelligence. Expect more deals between the two camps.

Blackbird Ventures: the capital behind it

A renaissance needs patient money, and Blackbird has been the most visible source of it. The Sydney firm was founded in 2012 and has invested in about 160 companies, including seven unicorns, among them Canva, Airwallex and SafetyCulture. In August it closed its sixth fund at A$1.05 billion, following a record fund of about A$1 billion in 2022, which was backed by superannuation funds such as AustralianSuper, Hostplus, HESTA and Aware Super.

Its healthtech fingerprints are all over this story. Blackbird led Heidi's Series C and backed it at seed in 2021, and it was an early investor in Pilot, the men's health brand that grew into Eucalyptus. Neither is a coincidence: the firm's model is to back founders before there is revenue and stay through to scale, which is precisely how a A$2 million seed round in 2019 can end in a US$1.15 billion exit seven years later.

The ecosystem is wider than one firm. Airtree led Everlab and backed Eucalyptus, TA Associates is behind Lanas, and Point72, General Catalyst and Left Lane are among the international funds now writing cheques into Australian companies. Aware Super and the National Reconstruction Fund are on the Harrison.ai register. Overall, Australian start-ups announced about A$1.8 billion in the first quarter of 2026 across 81 venture rounds, the strongest first quarter since the 2022 peak.

Two things are worth noting. Local funds are now large enough to lead growth rounds, which used to require an American investor. And the domestic pension system is finally feeding venture capital at scale. Both are structural changes, not a passing mood, which is the best argument that this is more than a bounce.

So, a renaissance?

On the evidence, yes, with three qualifications.

The case for is strong. There is a proven exit in Eucalyptus, a fast-scaling global product in Heidi, a well-funded preventative model in Everlab, deep infrastructure in Big Picture Medical and Lanas, and a home-grown venture industry, led by Blackbird, that can now write large cheques and hold on through growth. That combination did not exist a decade ago. What is different from earlier hype cycles is that the revenue is real: Heidi's US$50 million of recurring revenue and Eucalyptus's hundreds of thousands of paying customers are not projections.

The first qualification is where the value ends up. Eucalyptus is now part of a US company and Harrison.ai is shifting weight to the United States. If the pattern holds, Australia produces the founders and the first few hundred jobs while the value accrues elsewhere. Heidi, which is headquartered in Melbourne but spending most of its new capital abroad, will be the test case.

The second is regulation and trust. Healthcare is not a market where growth at all costs is forgiven. The scrutiny of Eucalyptus's marketing, the questions around Harrison.ai's US clinical service and the unresolved safety and privacy questions around AI in consultations all show that the licence to operate has to be earned repeatedly. The companies that treat clinical governance as a product feature, rather than a cost, will last.

The third is concentration. A handful of companies carry the narrative, and a single quarter of health deals is too small a sample to prove a trend: Australian biotech and medtech raised about A$829 million across 49 deals in 2025, so one large round can swing the numbers. A renaissance needs depth as well as peaks.

Four things are worth watching: whether Heidi reaches cash-flow neutrality on Tom Kelly's timetable, whether Everlab publishes independent outcome data as it enters the UK, whether Lanas's acquisitions give the new AI companies something to build on, and whether the founders who emerge from the Eucalyptus payout choose to stay and scale here.

If they do, this will look like a renaissance in hindsight. If they don't, it will look like a very good year. Right now, the honest answer is that it is both, and that the second half of that sentence is up to us.

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