September 2020 AI supplement editorial by James Mawson, editor in chief, Global Corporate Venturing
Wow, what a difference a year makes. In August, Teladoc agreed to acquire health monitoring platform Livongo, which provides services for managing chronic conditions for $18.5bn.
Livongo was a leader of the corporate-backed digital health companies that started an IPO surge last summer with corporate venturing portfolio companies first through the exit doors.
The surge followed a fairly barren three years for the digital health sector in the public markets but that 2019 interest has exploded since the coronavirus shut down people’s movements and pushed more reliance on technology.
Livongo’s about eightfold rise since its initial public offering has validated the corporate venture capitalists and venture capitalists’ forward-thinking on the broader demographics and societal needs as well as how artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies could combine to offer improved service.
Callum Cyrus’s main feature tackles the healthcare areas AI is already supporting, such as telemedicine, diagnostics and drug development.
But with healthcare already on the watch list for geopolitical considerations – biohacking tends to make politicians more than usually cautious and once you know a population’s genetic make-up and health concerns it is a threat opportunity for rival countries – expect the sector to remain polarised between the US and China.
Microsoft might be able to buy out the US customers of Bytedance’s Tiktok video application but without the algorithm its value is diminished. Imagine the same scenario for a government suddenly afraid of who owns their population healthcare data and how they could tailor a disease or virus that can target their specific genetic code.
Third-party nations, however, such as in Africa, are, for now, more open to technology from the AI giants coming out of China and the US.
But this can also undermine industries outside those two poles. There are very few healthtech unicorns in Europe for example, such as Benevolent AI, and compared with financial services, another large and heavily-regulated sector, AI usage is low. Some AI startups that began focusing on healthcare have pivoted to financial services to stay alive.
But the tech skills to manage AI in one field could be transferred back to healthcare. The fundamental hardware – as described in our first-quarter AI supplement – or software and operating systems – covered in the second quarter report – means the platform players, whether Nvidia, Google or Apple in the west or Tencent, Alibaba, SoftBank and Baidu in the east, have core advantages.
