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- Unicorns, seed to Series A, exposomics and more...
Unicorns, seed to Series A, exposomics and more...
Healthcare through a Kentucky lens. Yeah, it's niche. But neat!
Andrew Steen
February 24, 2026
🦄, shave your horn…
“Unicorn-versities”
This is an interesting piece of work from SignalFire.
“The top 6 engineering schools produced 16.3% of unicorn founders (Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, CMU, and Caltech).”
So…
The NSF HERD Survey is the primary source of information on research and development expenditures at U.S. colleges and universities. The data table(s) of relevance here are “Higher education R&D expenditures in engineering fields, ranked by FY 2024 total.” 2024 is the latest year available.
The University of Kentucky ranked 78th.
UofL ranked 141st.
“Yeah, but what about a more secular ranking?”
Will 2026 U.S. News & World Report rankings do?
The University of Kentucky is ranked 86.
UofL 125.
It’s just a data point.
Startups that get to Series A?
Remember the discussion of venture-backable startups—or lack thereof—in Louisville from January 20, 2026? Here it is for your convenient reference. Followed by “Seed fund(s) in a community correlation to Series A levels?”
Example thought...
US communities with a dearth of seed funds, do they produce fewer startups that get to Series A? Or do funds find those deals for Series A regardless?
I asked Victor Gutwein, Founder and Managing Partner at Chicago-based M25:
My gut reaction is that the later-stage of a fundraise, the less important it is to have capital based there, because the check size of the investor is big enough to diminish any travel/research/DD costs that come with doing deals further away from home. Series A these days are like $15-50M, so this is less friction to do that Series A deal. BUT the earliest stages gets more and more localized the smaller the round size/check size. So there is some association with early local capital and companies raising preseed/seed rounds, and then that does help more companies reach Series A.
Noting, too, that “the bar for Series A has gotten MUCH harder post-2022.”
More on this topic as it develops.
Health systems
“Mr. Arnold said Tampa General has built an AI governance framework designed not to slow innovation but to accelerate it responsibly.”
“Canary Speech… announced a partnership with Intermountain Ventures, the venture capital and innovation arm of Intermountain Health.”
Cool.
Frist Cressey Ventures
“Fund IV continues FCV's established success in partnering with leading healthcare organizations, including The Cigna Group Ventures, MedStar Health, and OhioHealth…” A payor and two health systems.
By the way, if Louisville had such a person, who would be Louisville’s community counterpart to Nashville’s Sen. Bill Frist, MD?
What is exposomics?
Watch.
Big fan of this space. Genomics ⇄ exposomics ⇄ GIS.
Predicting onset of AlzheimerĘĽs disease
“The samples were collected over a period of up to 10 years…”
Some of y’all already know what I’m going to say so I won’t. This time.
But… Yo. Louisville.
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