The losses behind the WIN.
There is a stat sitting in the welcome deck for our new accelerator cohort that I have not been able to stop looking at: over 100 AI healthcare companies applied. 27 made it to an interview. 10 got in.
FoXX Health is one of the 10.
I want to sit in that math for a second, because it is the truest description of startup life I have seen in a long time. Ten wins. Ninety-plus losses. And that ratio holds up no matter where you look, our own two years included. For every yes we have gotten, there have been far more no's, more silence, more "not right now." We were told no by accelerators before this one. We considered walking away from FoXX entirely at one point. We have built, rebuilt, and pitched this company more times than I can count on both hands. The losses have always outnumbered the wins. They still do. What changes is not the ratio. What changes is whether you are still standing when a win finally lands.
This one landed. FoXX Health has been accepted into Cohort I of Intelligence Ventures' new accelerator, alongside nine other AI healthcare companies working in oncology, cardiovascular monitoring, brain aneurysm risk, clinical simulation, and more. We head to Tampa this month to kick things off, and we pitch on a stage in New York this November.
Who Intelligence Ventures Is
Intelligence Ventures is a pre-seed and seed fund built specifically around AI healthcare, and their entire thesis comes down to one idea: proprietary data is the moat. They are not looking for a slide deck and a dream. They want companies with something real already in hand, whether that is an FDA clearance, a hospital contract, or in our case, licensing with the NIH, the National Library of Medicine, and SNOMED, plus the clinical partnerships we have been building through our work with the American Chronic Pain Association. They have reviewed over 630 startups and counting, and they narrowed a field of more than 100 applicants down to the 10 of us standing in that room in Tampa.
Getting a check from a fund like this is not just capital. It is a signal that the data foundation we have spent two years laying, quietly, unglamorously, is exactly the kind of asset this industry is going to be built on.
What It Means to Be the Women's Health Company in the Room
Look at the list of companies in our cohort. Spatial biology predicting which cancer drugs will work. Camera-based vital sign monitoring for hospital beds. Software that reads a blood pressure waveform to catch cardiovascular instability before it hits. Brain aneurysm rupture prediction. These are extraordinary, hard-science companies solving problems that can save a life in a single moment.
FoXX Health is solving a different kind of problem, one that unfolds over months and years instead of minutes: women whose symptoms get dismissed, misread, or explained away until someone finally connects the dots. I lived that story myself, chest pain mistaken for anxiety, six months to get an answer that should have taken six days. Whole-body symptom tracking that gets women taken seriously at the doctor is not a flashy pitch next to a stroke-risk algorithm.
But it belongs in that room, because women's health has been underfunded and under-built for decades, and every dollar and every ounce of credibility we bring into rooms like this one is a step toward closing that gap.
Being the women's health company in a cohort built around FDA clearances and pharma NDAs is not a coincidence. It is proof that this space is finally being evaluated on the same terms as the rest of healthcare AI: real data, real partnerships, real traction. We intend to keep it that way.
Still Counting the No's
We are not pretending the hard part is over. Accelerators do not fund companies, they open doors, and the work of walking through them is still ours to do. There will be more no's between now and Demo Day in New York, and plenty more after it. That has never stopped being true for us, and it will not stop being true now.
But for the first time in a while, the win outweighs the losses that came before it. Cohort I starts in Tampa this month. We will be there, representing every woman who has ever been told her symptoms were "probably just stress," and we will keep building the platform that proves otherwise.
Onward, from Michigan to Tampa to New York.
