Aspire Universal Launches $300 Million Precision Medicine Fund Focused on Personalized Devices and Medical Practices

Unique fund provides comprehensive set of resources to speed through R&D, clinical trials, FDA approval, commercialization, and insurance reimbursement


  • Aspire Universal (Aspire) and Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health (LG Health) partner as GPs of the fund to accelerate ventures with shared expertise and licensed intellectual property
  • Partnership re-engineers the startup process so fund’s investments can effectively “skip” multiple rounds using a fraction of the time and money necessary for comparable startups
  • Proven early stage model and portfolio with dramatic acceleration of startups through some of the toughest previously unsolved AI problems
  • 12-week accelerator program with LG Health, Capital Blue Cross, and Clio Health provides growth stage on-ramp for globally sourced digital health and medical device startups
  • $30M GP commitment; fundraising through strategic co-investor structure allows new corporate strategics to contribute specialized resources for additional acceleration

TEL AVIV, Israel and NEW YORK and LANCASTER, Pa., April 24, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Aspire Universal announced the establishment of the Aspire Ventures Precision Medicine Fund (AVP) to accelerate innovation for personalized devices and medical practices. Precision medicine is one of the most important transformations ever to come to medicine, and by shifting away from one-size-fits-all solutions, precision medicine offers personalized solutions that deliver better experiences and better outcomes at a lower cost. The AVP invests in devices and therapies that leverage AI and IoT to deliver affordable solutions at a massive scale that take into account each individual’s DNA, microbiome, biochemistry, and lifestyle.

The mission of the AVP is to transform and improve population health by leveraging AI and IoT to develop cutting-edge precision medicine technologies that could have a national, or even global, impact. The fund aims to achieve this goal by greatly accelerating the time-to-market for highly innovative and transformative personalized healthcare solutions – which are the foundation of precision medicine – while maximizing the potential market success rate of those solutions.

The AVP model aims to shave years and millions of dollars off the traditional investment process by leveraging strategic resources committed by Aspire and LG Health in the form of proprietary AI, health data, and clinical expertise. These strategic resources are made available to the AVP portfolio through formalized IP pools and accelerator programs for R&D, clinical trials, insurance reimbursement, and health system adoption.

With the AVP, Aspire combines its groundbreaking Adaptive Artificial Intelligence™ (A2I) platform and venture expertise with world-class research and clinical expertise from strategic partners targeting an 18-month concept-to-market acceleration. Ventures funded by the AVP not only benefit from Aspire’s intellectual property pool in AI and IoT, but also have unique access to the subject matter expertise of nearly 1,000 healthcare providers, anonymized data for R&D purposes, facilitation of clinical trials and oversight, a unique path to insurance reimbursement, the powerful A2I platform, and investors eager to become customers.

Clinicians from LG Health and innovators from Aspire will work side-by-side to synthesize complex AI and clinical research and fast-track ventures through clinical trials and FDA approval. For example, Aspire and LG Health founded the Smart Health Innovation Lab, a joint venture with Capital Blue Cross. At the Innovation Lab, eight start-ups per year sponsored by the AVP GP’s will proceed through a 12-week intensive certification process that is designed to accelerate insurance reimbursement and pilot deployments.

“Integrating better technology into the U.S. healthcare system is one of the most viable solutions for curbing skyrocketing costs. The overwhelming majority of healthcare investments fail because they are designed in isolation from the health systems that use them,” said Essam Abadir, AVP Fund Manager and Managing Partner of Aspire Universal. “As a result, they are extremely capital intensive and take a very long time to go through R&D, the FDA, and gain market traction. By establishing the new AVP fund, we are pursuing the promise of precision medicine as one of the main drivers for healthcare transformation.”

By leveraging the strategic committed resources of Aspire and LG Health, the AVP will systematically accelerate adoption of healthcare technologies to affect the highest impact on the health and wellness of Americans and individuals across the globe.

To learn more about the AVP, please contact Aspire Universal: https://aspireuniversal.com/contact/

About Aspire Universal
Aspire Universal is a private equity firm and venture company focused on transforming industries and impact investment with innovative methodology and disruptive technologies. Aspire’s venture funds leverage their capital, intellectual property and domain expertise to help bring breakthrough technologies to market faster and more cost effectively for the benefit of people worldwide. Composed of business leaders and experts with proven track records, Aspire Universal brings a unique approach to investment.

Aspire Universal has developed A2I, a meta-artificial intelligence platform using a master algorithm approach to go beyond the current limitations of narrow approaches like deep neural networks and to help its portfolio companies offer innovative technologies in the areas of mobile, cloud, machine learning, and big data analytics for a variety of industry sectors, most notably healthcare. Aspire’s first fund, launched in 2014, produced venture breakthroughs in disease management, patient experience data, and automated health assessments, using AI and IoT, with companies like MedStatix, Tempo Health, Connexion Health, Appmobi, and Wylei.

Aspire Universal is based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. For more information please visit https://aspireuniversal.com.  

Contacts
Drew Smith
10Fold for Aspire Universal
dsmith@10fold.com
(415) 800-5374