MATTER’s next chapter: a new home for healthcare innovation

Looking forward to MATTER’s next 10 years

MATTER was founded 10 years ago to accelerate the pace of change of healthcare. Our thesis was — and still is — that the more we can foster collaborations between entrepreneurs and industry leaders, the faster we can advance healthcare innovation.

Over the last 10 years, MATTER has incubated more than 1,000 healthcare and life sciences startups. Our member companies have gone on to raise more than $5 billion to fuel their growth. Their solutions have been used by 5 million clinicians and have improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world. We’ve teamed up with health systems, life sciences companies, insurance companies, foundations, associations and universities to run more than 60 startup accelerators — cohorts focused on big problems, such as maternal mortality, mental health, brain health, diabetes and on and on. We’ve helped more than 100 foreign companies bring their innovations into the United States to benefit U.S. patients. And we’ve helped more than 65 large enterprises become better innovators themselves.

In addition to celebrating a decade of healthcare innovation, we recently opened a new office — designed specifically as a platform for discovery, collaboration and partnership — to foster the next waves of healthcare innovation.

We’ve made a lot of progress, but we have so much more work to do. Our healthcare system is fractured, impossibly expensive and pretty terrible at keeping people healthy. We need more innovation — from both entrepreneurs and large enterprises alike — to tackle the challenges and help us achieve the potential of what our healthcare system should be able to do for our entire population.

At our opening event last month, Dana Edelson, chief medical officer and co-founder of AgileMD, who has been a MATTER member since our inception in 2015, reflected, “AI is everywhere and changing almost everything we do, but what hasn’t changed is the need for ecosystems like MATTER to help entrepreneurs take big ideas and turn them into real-world solutions. MATTER is truly a launch pad for innovation in healthcare, and if this is what the first 10 years have looked like, I’m so excited to see what we do in the next 10 years.”

I’m excited too. We’ve built a huge community of entrepreneurs, corporate executives, investors and others who are collaborating every day, in person and virtually, to activate healthcare innovation. As we head into our second decade, we will continue to grow our community and support more solutions to healthcare’s vexing challenges.

Our board chair David Ormesher said at our opening event, “If you are a corporate executive, or a healthcare innovator, or someone who wants to make an impact and mentor the next generation, or someone who wants to invest in a startup, or who wants to jumpstart innovation in your own company, there’s a place for you here at MATTER.”

We at MATTER feel fortunate to be able to do the kind of work that we do, and we look forward to continuing to build the next generation of healthcare innovation with our community.