Caffeine presents: Pathways - The Lessons learned building a global company
Plus: Massive raise for AI-powered Healthcare startup.
Kia ora Caffeinators,
Happy Tuesday. Plenty cooking in startup land so lets just get into it.
Here’s what’s brewing in your Daily Shot:
Event: Pathways: a virtual interview with Ellie Brade, Co-Founder of Cleanery
Raise: Heidi Health closes $65m Series B
Podpick: NBR Podcast with Simon Shepherd, is Healthcare insurance unaffordable?
OpenAI launches new app functionality inside chat
As always, thank you to everyone who has upgraded to a paid subscription or simply recommended Caffeine to friends and whānau. We couldn’t do any of this without you.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
Event: Pathways: a virtual interview with Ellie Brade, Co-Founder of Cleanery - As I mentioned last week, we want to ensure our events are as accessible as possible. So we’re making this one a webinar available to all. Join us for a live conversation, where we dive into the moments, missteps, and lessons that have shaped Ellie’s journey in being a founder. This session will explore what our guest wishes she had known earlier, the pivotal experiences that shifted her perspective, and the insights she carries forward today. It’s an honest, practical discussion designed to spark reflection and help others navigate their own path.
Date and time
Thu, 30 Oct 2025 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM NZDT
Location
Online
Register here.
Raise: Heidi Health closes $65m Series B - I’ve been saying for a while in this newsletter that Health tech is the one of those sectors I am eyeing most closely and news like this reminds me why. Healthcare AI company Heidi has closed a $65m ($100m NZD) Series B funding round, led by Point72 Private Investments with participation from Blackbird, Headline, and Latitude, the growth fund of Phoenix Court.
This round values Heidi at $465 USD million and brings total funding to nearly $100 million. The company have developed an AI scribe which sits alongside clinicians, to automate tasks such as clinical documentation, evidence search, and follow-up communications. Research shows clinicians spend nearly as much time on administration as on patient care. In just 18 months, Heidi has returned more than 18 million hours to frontline clinicians by streamlining critical administrative tasks. Heidi is also one of two AI scribes currently being trialled by Health NZ here in Aotearoa
Podpick: NBR Podcast with Simon Shepherd, is Healthcare insurance unaffordable? - Relevant to the above, Simon over at NBR has a great episode about the rising cost of Health insurance amid a wider crunch across health care. With the NZ public health system struggling, more Kiwis are seeing the cost of private health insurance rise. Premiums are being hiked across the board. He sat down with Southern Cross insurance CEO to find out what’s going on. How can New Zealanders continue to access affordable healthcare? At least part of the solution hopefully, from the startup perspective, will be company's like Heidi continuing to innovate. Listen below.
OpenAI launches new app functionality inside chat: OpenAI has had its dev day this week and there is far too much news to parse in one little parting shot. So I’ll get into the meat of it on Thursday once I’ve had a minute to digest everything but one feature that caught my eye immediately was the introduction of in chat apps.
Now developers can build so Chat GPT will call up relevant apps natively in the chat where it fits queries. Of course this will be handy for users not wanting to run multiple tabs but feels more important as a step toward OpenAI making ChatGPT the ‘everything app’. Its pilot partners are Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify and Zillow.
Whack a UberEats in there, some short form AI slop and gaming integration and pretty soon you’ll have a substantial portion of the population never leaving the chat.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co