Does Innovation Really Depend on When the Money Comes In? Even Healthcare Makes the Case for Early Capital With Caution
By Arunima Rajan
In an interview with Healthcare Executive Magazine Matilde Giglio, Co-founder, Even Healthcare says that innovation has no connection to when a startup receives funding.
How does delaying large investments help a young healthcare startup preserve a culture of disciplined experimentation instead of rushing into premature scale?
In healthcare, experimentation isn’t a function of how much capital you raise, but of the culture you intentionally build. I don’t believe delaying investment is what creates disciplined experimentation. What matters is having the conviction to keep iterating even when you have resources. For us, raising substantial capital early allowed us to experiment faster, with proper clinical rigor and safety nets. It helped us build the right teams, infrastructure, and quality controls that healthcare demands. The discipline came from an internal belief that patient outcomes come before scale, not from the size of the bank account.
What advantages have you seen when teams focus on achieving genuine product–market fit before pursuing major funding rounds?
I agree that product–market fit is non-negotiable. Where I differ is in the assumption that funding and PMF must be sequential. In healthcare, certain layers such as data systems, compliance, clinical operations need upfront investment simply to run experiments responsibly. From day one, we built around salaried doctors and full-time clinical teams, partnered closely with clinics and hospitals, and then progressively moved toward launching our own facilities. These are not things you can meaningfully pilot without capital, but they are essential to understanding whether a care model truly works in real patient settings. For us, raising early helped us validate PMF with far more depth, because we could test in real clinical settings rather than hypothetical ones. Capital didn’t distract us from PMF; it enabled a more rigorous, outcome-driven version of it.”
Do early big-ticket investments risk pulling founders toward investor expectations instead of customer learning, and how can startups guard against that drift?
That risk exists for any founder, regardless of stage or cheque size. The safeguard is clarity of mission. If you anchor your decisions in patient needs and measurable health outcomes, investor expectations naturally align around that. Over the last four years, we’ve raised around $75mn, and that capital has been deployed entirely toward building the clinical and operational backbone we believe the sector needs. With the right partners, early investment strengthens, not dilutes customer learning. So, more than the timing or the size of investment, choosing investors who share your time horizon is what protects customer-centricity.
Many founders say large early funding creates pressure to show rapid growth, which can unintentionally stifle innovation. Have you observed this tension in healthcare, and how does timing of investment influence it?
Healthcare has its own pace. You cannot brute-force growth without compromising clinical quality - and no responsible founder will do that. So, while pressure exists in any venture-backed company, healthcare naturally acts as a governor. In our case, raising early didn’t stifle innovation; it insulated it. It gave our teams the room to build the right clinical stack, test models carefully, and prioritise long-term outcomes over short-term growth curves. So, timing matters less than the clarity of your north star and the discipline to stick to it.
Given healthcare’s regulated and slow-moving environment, how does waiting for substantial capital strengthen a startup’s ability to build operational resilience and navigate compliance more effectively?
In my experience, waiting doesn’t strengthen resilience, building does. And building in healthcare often requires meaningful capital upfront. Compliance, clinical validation, and responsible operations are expensive, and doing them well cannot be deferred. So instead of waiting for capital, we chose to raise early and build resilience from day one. It allowed us to create systems that could scale safely, rather than retrofitting compliance later, which is often riskier and more expensive.
Is the timing of investment as important as the type of investor you bring on board, and how do you ensure investors stay aligned with a more exploratory, long-term approach?
The type of investor matters far more than timing. If your investors fundamentally believe that healthcare outcomes take time, they will support a long-term roadmap irrespective of cheque size or stage. We’ve always been very intentional about bringing in partners who understand healthcare deeply and are comfortable with evidence-led progress rather than short-term metrics. Having investors like Khosla Ventures, Lightrock India, Alpha Wave Global among others has reinforced that approach. They recognise that clinical quality, regulatory rigour, and patient outcomes cannot be rushed. That alignment is what gives a company the room to explore, experiment, and build models that genuinely move the needle on healthcare outcomes.
What criteria or decision frameworks would you recommend for early-stage founders choosing between continued bootstrapping and experimentation versus raising a large round? The lens I use is simple: What kind of innovation are you pursuing?
Can it be responsibly tested without institutional capital? Does delaying capital compromise clinical quality or speed of learning? If your product requires deep clinical operations, data systems, or regulatory infrastructure, raising earlier may be the responsible choice. If it’s lightweight and can be tested cheaply, experimentation before fundraising makes sense. There isn’t one universal formula. Founders should choose the path that maximises their ability to learn quickly without compromising patient outcomes.
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