In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at Inspiren’s technology for senior living centers, AARP’s physician CEO, Oura’s coming IPO and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
Inspiren’s Michael Wang (left) and Alex Hejnosz
Sam Lustig (Lustig Photography)
After seven years as a U.S. Army Green Beret, including two consecutive tours in Afghanistan, Michael Wang launched a second career as a cardiothoracic nurse at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. While there, he created a wall-mounted AI unit to improve patient safety and clinical outcomes, starting with reducing falls, which are a major cause of ER visits and even death in the elderly.
In 2016, his innovation became the basis of startup Inspiren. Today, after switching its business focus from hospitals to senior living centers, Inspiren has deployed its sensors to monitor some 40,000 residents at just over 500 senior living facilities nationwide. As assisted living facilities and memory care centers rapidly deploy its technology (which costs around $1,000 per resident), contracted revenue has surpassed $60 million, while revenue the company is currently bringing in from subscriptions has nearly quadrupled to $29 million from $8 million last year.
“My vision is that falls will someday become so rare that people will be shocked that someone fell and hurt themselves in a senior living facility,” Wang tells Forbes.
Today, Inspiren (the name comes from the word “inspire” and the Mandarin word “ren,” which means humanity) tells Forbes that it has closed a new $70 million investment round, led by NewView Capital, at a valuation of $550 million. The funding brings its total investment to $225 million, which it says is the largest amount for any company in the sector. Other investors include Insight Partners, Primary Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners.
NewView partner Nick Bunick says when he first heard about Inspiren from a VC friend on its board, the idea immediately clicked. Not only was he an investor in other startups using physical AI, but his own dad had suffered a precipitous health decline after falling on the way to the restroom one night at a senior living facility. He pursued Inspiren CEO Alex Hejnosz relentlessly, sending 15 cold emails over the course of a year, before getting any response. “I even spoke to a number of his customers and sent him a thoughtful deck of what his customers were saying,” Bunick says. “Because I spent so much time with companies using computer vision, I knew this problem could be solved.”
Senior living centers are one of the least glamorous areas of healthcare, but one that’s desperately in need of change. The 85-and-older population is the fastest growing age group in the country, a trend that’s expected to accelerate with the oldest Boomers turning 80 this year. Yet senior living centers are chronically understaffed, with their low-paid workers facing burnout. A total of 3.5 million people in America reside in senior living facilities, which encompass independent living apartments, assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing care.
“For the last 15 to 20 years, senior living has been an ignored category,” Hejnosz says. “All of a sudden people realized that the Boomers are actually aging into the asset class.”
Inspiren’s ambient sensors use computer vision to collect real-time data on residents (using stick-figure imagery for privacy). Its devices can detect problems–such as a resident who appears to be having difficulty getting out of bed–to alert staff and permit two-way communication before there’s a crisis. It recently added sensing to residents’ bathrooms, a high-risk area for falls, using privacy-protecting radar and floor detection.
Its devices have produced real results, including reduced falls, fewer injuries and less visits to the ER, for senior living operators including Aegis Living, Clearwater Living and Solera Senior Living. At Solera’s Lumina Las Vegas facility, for example, a 10-month study showed a 48% reduction in falls, 54% fewer hospitalizations and 50% faster response time with Inspiren.
Aging populations within senior living facilities have made the technology increasingly necessary, while improvements in AI and the decreased costs of sensors have made it possible. The devices need to decipher the difference between, say, someone who is falling versus praying or doing yoga, Bunick says.
“It is still this outlandish idea that I am going to take a device, point it at a human being and predict the future,” says Hejnosz, who previously co-founded CipherHealth and joined Inspiren as CEO in late-2022.
With the new funding, Inspiren plans to increase its predictive capabilities to keep residents safer and to determine who might need extra help, whether due to the loss of a spouse or because their cognitive abilities have begun to decline. Says Hejnosz: “I want to understand earlier signals on health and longevity.”
How AARP’s CEO Went From Practicing Medicine To Defending Social Security
AARP’s Myechia Myechia Minter-Jordan
JARED SOARES FOR AARP
Dr. Myechia Minter-Jordan, a former physician, became CEO of AARP, the giant non-profit organization for older Americans, in November 2024. Like many doctors who make career switches, Minter-Jordan, who is 54, both loved practicing medicine and ultimately felt she could have a larger impact in a different role.
“I was always attracted to what’s happening in the system,” she tells Forbes. “How is the system influencing the relationship I have with my patient, the experience that my patient has in the healthcare system?”
Asking those questions led her to become CEO of The Dimock Center in Massachusetts, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit community health centers, and then of CareQuest Institute of Oral Health, an organization working to make oral health more accessible and equitable. Now at AARP, she’s fighting for Social Security, knowing that 20% of Americans over age 50 have no retirement savings.
The significance of Americans’ increased life expectancy, now at a high of 79, is on her mind. “One of the biggest impacts of living longer is what that means in terms of retirement,” she says.
Read more here.
What’s Smart-Ring Maker Oura Worth?
Smart-ring maker Oura revealed revenue of $1.2 billion for the nine months ended June 30–up 74% over the same period the previous year–in documents filed with the SEC for its coming IPO. The filing also showed still meager, but much improved profits of $60.8 million in the same nine-month period compared with just $1.6 million in the same period last year.
The San Francisco-based company, whose ring is used by some 5 million subscribers to track health metrics that include heart rate and sleep, is expected to get a valuation above the $11 billion it was worth at its most recent venture funding round last year. Bloomberg reported that it is seeking to raise $3 billion at a valuation of more than $16 billion.
Whether Oura is worth $16 billion depends, in large part, on the value of its health data.
A proposed class action lawsuit alleged that Oura’s AI-powered devices can’t measure users’ sleep stages as accurately as advertised. Oura has disputed the allegations.
However the lawsuit plays out, wearables, like Oura’s ring, can still be helpful for measuring personal trends over time.
In an unpublished interview earlier this year, Shyamal Patel, Oura’s senior vice president of science, told Forbes that the company was “just scratching the surface” of what it could do with its data. “As you start pulling together data from your wearable and your health records, I think we will start seeing these patterns emerge that will enable us to be more proactive about our health,” he said then.
What We’re Reading
Workers face open-enrollment sticker shock as costs for health benefits are projected to soar 8.2%, more than double general inflation and the most in 24 years.
These pediatricians take on vaccine-hesitant parents when others won’t by talking through their concerns without hardline dismissals.
Documents suggest that New Yorkers were misled about air quality after 9/11, potentially exposing workers and residents to asbestos and other dangerous toxins.
Merck’s M&A chief expects “a lot more” deals as the patent cliff nears for its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda.
Kansas Senator Roger Marshall spent 25 years as an obstetrician-gynecologist, during which time he sued more than 700 patients for outstanding bills and routinely charged them 18% interest.
Forus, which uses AI to process prescriptions faster, tripled its valuation to $3 billion just four months after hitting $1 billion.
MORE FROM FORBES
Be the first to comment