Aspire Universal, a private equity firm and venture company today announced the establishment of the $300M 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 fund will focus on investing 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. Aspire Universal (Aspire) and Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health (LG Health) will serve as general partners (GP) of the fund to accelerate ventures with shared expertise and licensed intellectual property.
Aspire Ventures Precision Medicine Fund (AVP) Overview
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. 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.
12-Week Accelerator Program
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. 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.
“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.”
