Venture

Venerable Venture Shop Kleiner Makes Twin Bets On Health Startups

Morning Markets: Happy Friday, let’s check in on what the new crew at Kleiner are up to.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

Now that Kleiner’s split from Mary Meeker (now of Bond) is complete, its new crew is free to make its mark. That in mind, I’ve been keeping an eye on where Ilya Fushman, Monica Desai, Mamoon Hamid, Annie Case, and the rest deploy capital out of their new fund.1

Given that Kleiner is a firm with a number of investing partners and a host of prior investments to top-up from time to time, its deal flow is pretty quick.

Still, Kleiner announced a brace of deals in the health space this week that caught my eye. Let’s peek at a few recent deals from the group, see if we can find a pattern, and then poke at the health-tech deals and see if they fit into the mix in any particular way.

Recently

Returning to the start of April, Crunchbase has Kleiner down as taking part in the Rippling Series A, the STORD Series A, the Labelbox Series A, the BUMP Series A, the CodeSandbox Seed round, the Feather Series A, and the Daisie Seed round. All that before we even get to its latest health-related deals.

It’s a lot of deal flow to keep track of. Really an impossible amount if you want to do anything else, but for fun, here’s how I would categorize those deals:

  • Rippling: HR and personal redemption.
  • STORD: Logistics.
  • Labelbox: AI.
  • BUMP: “Social P2P Marketplace for Gen Z (YC W18)” per Crunchbase, which I cannot improve upon.
  • CodeSandbox: Dev tools.
  • Feather: Furniture-as-a-service.
  • Daisie: Maisie Williams’s creative collab startup.

The list of recent early-stage deals from Kleiner is pretty diverse. It doesn’t, at least looking at this fraction of Kleiner’s deals, have a super consistent theme; vertical SaaS or greentech this is not.

When I started writing to you this morning, I had hoped that we’d find some trend to put the Future Series A and the Modern Health Series A into, but I can’t quite see it. So, let’s examine those two firms so that we have at least that in hand:

  • Future: A coaching app focused on “1-on-1 digital training” per its website. If you are somewhat wealthy (have a smartphone, have access to gym equipment, and can afford to pay around $150 a month for extra training), the service will help you work out more often and better, I presume. Kleiner led its $8.5 million Series A.
  • Modern Health: A mental health “platform” for employers to take better care of workers, it seems. The firm’s website isn’t super explicit (it’s about page lists team, values, and leadership, but not a declarative we-do-this statement), but there’s a lot to like here, frankly. It’s working to lessen a material problem (the lack of mental healthcare available to folks), was founded by women, and appears to have all sides of its marketplace of sorts figured out (employees, employers, care providers). Kleiner co-led its $9 million Series A.

So today we’ve learned two things. First, that Kleiner is cutting lots of checks. And, that it’s doing so with self-confidence. You don’t get that many deals done in that many spaces if you aren’t trusting yourself, I reckon.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.


  1. Those are the only four from Kleiner’s current list of investors I’ve met; there are others like Josh Coyne, etc.

Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the Crunchbase Daily.

Copy link