A midyear report from prominent healthcare startup accelerator Rock Health provides numbers to confirm the anecdotal impression: Digital health is the perhaps the hottest category to fund for venture capitalists.
So far, the sector has raised $2.3 billion this year—which already exceeds the $1.5 billion raised in all of 2013. And this isn't a matter of digital health simply being pulled along by the tide pouring into all startups: While first-quarter funding is up 57% year-over-year for all sectors, it's up 85% for digital health. (More traditional healthcare categories are not benefitting from the boom with only 22% year-over-year gain for biotech, and 5% for medical devices.)