Adele Moynihan, head of Bupa Ventures. Image courtesy of Medium.
Bupa Asia Pacific, a regional subsidiary of UK health insurer British United Provident Association (Bupa), has launched a A$20m ($13m) corporate venture capital fund.
Dubbed Bupa Ventures, the corporate VC unit will invest up to A$2m per deal in seed to series A-stage healthcare technology startups in the Asia-Pacific region.
Adele Moynihan, head of Bupa Ventures, has been working on building the unit for the past five months. “Behind the scenes, the ventures team has been aligning Bupa’s robust capabilities to be able to deliver value beyond capital to the healthtechs we fund,” she said on LinkedIn.
Bupa Ventures will invest in companies developing predictive and preventative healthcare, genomics and personalised medicine, and remote monitoring technologies.
“We’re just not going to come up with the innovation ourselves,” Nick Stone, chief executive of Bupa APAC, told the Australian Financial Review in an interview. Stone stressed the importance of customer engagement in an increasingly digitalised healthcare system.
Bupa Australia has already made some startup investments, having co-led UK care provider George Health Enterprises’ $35m funding round in 2020. The corporate also ran a startup accelerator called Blue Table in 2017.
In 2021 Bupa partnered with AirSeed Technologies, a company that uses drones to plant trees, and Good Edi, another Australian company producing edible coffee cups, as part of a A$200,000 sustainability-related initiative.
