Three medtech companies have topped LinkedIn’s annual list of startups with the most employment growth, but is working at these groups good or bad for your career?
Vastly reduced access to venture capital funding in the last few years does not seem to have slowed down at least three medical technology start-ups if headcount growth and employee engagement are your key measures of growth.
Vertically integrated online Cannabis group Montu (which now has over $100 million in revenue), single indication digital healthcare clinic group Eucalyptus (over $60 million in revenue), and generative medical AI software group Heidi Health, came first, second and fourth in LinkedIn’s Top Startups Australia List.
The list ranking startups in Australia five years old or less with more than 30 employees, essentially by growth in FTEs and interest in working at each group.
LinkedIn says the rankings are created through measuring a combination of employment growth, engagement, job interest and attraction of top talent.
Employment growth is measured as percentage headcount increase in financial year 2023-24; engagement measures non-employee views and follows of the company’s LinkedIn page; job interest measures the rate at which people are viewing and applying for jobs at the company; and attraction of top talent measures how many employees the startup has recruited away from any global LinkedIn Top Company, as a percentage of the startup’s total workforce.
So who did our LinkedIn healthcare startup technology medical darlings beat out for the top 10 honours?
Constantinople, a software platform that helps banks manage customer service and banking products, operations, compliance and anti-money laundering; Vow, a food biotech company that uses animal cells to grow meat-like products; Ofload, which is digitising Australian trucking fleets to create centralised supply chain; Howatson, a newish ad agency; Zeller, an SMB payments group; and Safewill, an end-of-life planning platform.
Not that long ago, fintech was the place to be for ambitious career builders in startups, but this year’s list is clearly dominated by healthtech.
Local LinkedIn career expert Cayla Dengate says that the Top Startups List can “help Aussie professionals discover emerging companies across multiple sectors and help provide valuable insights for those looking to grow their career”.
But potential new employees beware.
The LinkedIn methodology doesn’t include potentially important extra-curricular information around the career enhancing (or potentially degrading) potential of its winners such as, are they
being sued in a very public way by the Therapeutics Goods and Administration (TGA) for alleged unlawful advertising of medicinal cannabis on websites and social media.
In starting proceedings against Montu in April this year the TGA accused the company of advertising prescription-only medicines directly to consumers and said such activity could create an inappropriate demand for these medicines and lead to unnecessary or harmful prescribing.
Neither does the LinkedIn list include any reference to any of a number of media reports about Montu questioning the company’s vertically integrated business model whereby the group owns and runs production, distribution and prescribing of medicinal cannabis, all under the one roof.
This is a business model that is anathema to Australia’s traditional healthcare system which has traditionally maintained strict ownership separation between production and supply of medications, prescribing of medications and dispensing – that being a separation between pharmaceutical companies who make drugs, doctors who prescribe them and pharmacists who dispense them.
In the Montu model they do it all, something which a lot of industry commentators have suggested is an unacceptable conflict of interest and a loophole, created by an ageing Medicare model that is not keeping up with technology, which regulators are going to need to close soon.
Number Two on LinkedIn’s winner list, Eucalyptus, is the subject of similar levels of controversy in the press for its business model, which the AMA and the RACGP have openly claimed is potentially dangerous to patients.
Perhaps ironically, Eucalyptus has itself been critical of the online cannabis sector, its CEO Tim Doyle recently telling Health Services Daily that his group decided not to leverage its significant existing patient base and tech platforms to move into that market because there was no evidence base for the use of cannabis as a medication.
Although it has corrected governance around its online prescribing of drugs such as Ozempic recently, not long ago, any punter could go online and fake who they were over a text exchange with the group (a doctor according to the group) to secure themselves an endless supply of a Schedule 4 drug which can have serious side effects including allergic reactions, hypoglycaemia, blindness, increased thyroid cancer risk, gallstones and swelling of the pancreas.
Eucalyptus has found itself in trouble with the medical establishment on quite a few other fronts as well, including a claimed inability to link its patients appropriately with their regular GP so that a patient’s usual doctor and the system was aware they were on drugs like Ozempic. It has also come under fire for making compounded Ozempic via local pharmacies, using unknown sources of raw material from India and China for patients when supply from the global manufacturer ran short; and creating a shortage of Ozempic for diabetes type 2 patients by pushing it so hard to patients who wanted to lose weight.
Health Services Daily has talked to a lot of younger GPs who have worked for Eucalyptus and some of its competitors, and they have said the experience of working at these companies was fun, a great learning experience and exciting, citing the desire to do things interesting beyond their base medical degrees and employment as a doctor.
So one the one hand, notwithstanding some of the controversy, many younger doctors like the experience and challenge of working at these startups.
But on the other, HSD, is also aware of several ex-doctor employees of these companies that won’t include them on their CV when going for certain jobs in the medical sector now.
In one case we had a very senior and influential person insist we cut out his employment history at a very senior level of one of these companies in a story we were doing (we didn’t do that).
The established medical sector looks so dimly on some of these companies and their practices that a lot of ex-employees do not want their peers to know they have ever worked there, an effect that has likely been amplified by several recent instances of current and ex-employees being criticised openly at established medical conferences and events when they present on stage.
All this, while many of these ex-employees will still admit to enjoying their stints at these startups.
Heidi Health, which is an AI medical start up, focussing in the particular on the utility of generative AI in applications like medical scribing, isn’t anywhere near as controversial as Montu and Eucalyptus.
But the medical establishment isn’t entirely enamoured of the use of generative AI in medicine so far – they want far more work done around governance and guiderails – so it’s not inconceivable that working there might attract the ire of some establishment types in the future and influence future job prospects of getting more traditional medical roles in some way, as appears to be happening with Montu and Eucalyptus.
All three top 10 Startup list winners would probably maintain that they are breaking down unnecessary barriers to old established ways of delivering medicine with innovative new approaches that are far more patient and doctor centric.
But that doesn’t mean working there will necessarily be great for your future employment prospects in the medical sector, as LinkedIn’s press release seems to suggest.