Going stateside: Australian healthtech taking on America
As I heard once on a startup podcast, “You are either building a startup in the traditional sense of the word, to go global and take on the world, or you’re running a small business”.
Every Australian healthtech startup with big ambition eventually looks at the same map and lands on the same spot. The home market is a good place to build and prove a product. It is a relatively small-ish place to scale one. Almost twenty eight million people, a single payer that moves slowly, and a private sector that is consolidated and cautious. Sooner or later the conversation turns to the United States, a market ten times the size with the deepest healthcare spend and the deepest pools of capital on earth.
The interesting part is not that they go. It is how they go, and what the pattern tells you. Here is a high-level run through of the current crop, and what separates the companies building something durable from the ones planting a flag.
Why (almost) everyone eventually heads stateside
The pull is simple maths, with the US spending more than four trillion dollars a year on healthcare, roughly a fifth of its economy. It has thousands of independent health systems, payers and provider groups, each a potential customer, and a reimbursement system that, for all its dysfunction, will pay for software and devices that demonstrably save money or time. It also has the venture capital. American investors write bigger cheques, at higher valuations, with more appetite for healthcare risk. For a founder who has validated a product at home, the US is where the business actually gets big.
Who is doing it
Heidi is the breakout case. The Melbourne AI scribe, founded by former vascular surgical resident Dr Tom Kelly, listens to clinical consultations and writes the notes (amongst other recent functions and releases). It has scaled faster than almost any Australian healthtech in memory: a US$65 million Series B led by Point72 in late 2025 at a US$465 million valuation, more than two million consultations a week across 116 countries, and a system wide rollout at Beth Israel Lahey Health, one of the largest hospital networks in Massachusetts. To build commercial muscle it hired a chief revenue officer from Plaid and a chief medical officer who held the same role at Microsoft. Fellow Melbourne scribe Lyrebird Health also went international, although it has gone after the UK and Middle East first.
Harrison.ai is the diagnostic AI flagship. The Sydney company, led by Dr Aengus Tran, builds imaging AI for radiology (via a joint venture with imaging network I-MED) and pathology (Franklin.ai). A US$112 million Series C in early 2025, clearances across more than forty countries, and a North American base in Boston. It is now one of the most globally deployed diagnostic companies Australia has produced.
4DMedical turned a Melbourne research idea into an ASX listed lung imaging business. Founded by Andreas Fouras, its software pulls functional ventilation and perfusion data out of standard CT and X-ray scans, sold as a service that needs no new hardware. After FDA clearance for its CT:VQ product, it raised more than US$100 million in early 2026 to fund the American push, with early adopters including Stanford, Cleveland Clinic, and UC San Diego, plus a route into the VA hospital system through US veterans' lung disease legislation.
Saluda Medical is the device story. Spun out of Australian research and based in Artarmon in Sydney, Saluda built Evoke, a closed loop spinal cord stimulation system that reads the spine's response to stimulation and adjusts itself in real time. It won full FDA approval in 2022 on the back of the first double blind randomised controlled trial ever used to support a spinal cord stimulation approval, with results in the Lancet Neurology and JAMA Neurology, and is now commercialising into the US pain market.
Vantari VR builds what it calls a flight simulator for healthcare: immersive VR that lets clinicians rehearse high risk procedures before they perform them on a real patient. Founded in Sydney by two doctors, it grew from around ten hospitals in Australia to more than thirty in the US, with customers including Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess, Yale, and Mount Sinai. In 2026 it made the move official and established its North American headquarters in Seattle.
Perx Health took behavioural science to American chronic care. Founded in Sydney in 2017 by two former finance and consulting operators, Scott Taylor and Hugo Rourke, Perx gamifies medication adherence, rewarding patients for taking their medications and showing up to appointments. They proved it with a randomised controlled trial run with the University of Sydney and published in the BMJ, then launched in the US in 2021, set up an American headquarters in Chicago, and Taylor relocated to lead it.
Coviu is the quieter infrastructure play. The virtual care platform, founded by Silvia Pfeiffer, became one of Australia's most used telehealth systems through the pandemic, powering tens of thousands of consultations a day, and launched into the US in 2022 to take its connected care toolkit to American providers. It is a reminder that not every expansion is a headline raise. Some are a steady widening of an already proven platform.
MedAdvisor took the route none of the others did, it bought its way in. The Melbourne company acquired US firm Adheris Health from Syneos Health in 2020 for up to US$34.5 million, funded by a capital raise, rather than integrate with American pharmacies from scratch. That deal eventually became the whole company. In 2025 MedAdvisor sold its ANZ operations to Jonas Software. What is left is essentially an American company: US chief executive, Massachusetts headquarters, most revenue from the States. The reach is real. The shareholder return has not been, with the stock down heavily from its raise price, a reminder that buying scale and creating value are not the same thing.
Superpower is the outlier, and a useful one. The preventive health super app, which sells members biannual blood testing across more than a hundred biomarkers for US$499 a year, was founded in San Francisco in 2023 by Sydney born Max Marchione alongside two American-based co-founders. It raised a US $30 million Series A led by Forerunner at a reported valuation north of $300 million, with a 150,000 person waitlist and a roster of celebrity backers. Superpower is Australian only in the sense that one of its founders is. There was no local validation phase. Marchione moved to the US and built an American company from day one.
None of this is new, for what it is worth. The path was worn decades ago by the old guard. ResMed built a global respiratory business with Australian origins and runs it today out of San Diego, now serving well over a hundred million patients. Cochlear became the world leader in hearing implants from a base in Sydney, and remains one of the most valuable medical technology companies the country has produced. The current generation is moving faster and lighter, but it is following a route Australian healthcare has travelled before.
The patterns worth noticing
A founder almost always moves, as running the US from a Zoom window in Sydney was never going to fly. American healthcare, like Australian healthcare, is bought through relationships, clinical champions and warm introductions, not cold outreach. The companies that work it out invest early in local presence: a beachhead city chosen for its hospitals and talent, and senior American hires who already have the network. Heidi hiring a CRO from Plaid is the same instinct as Vantari building research partnerships with US universities. You can buy the local knowledge rather than trying to manufacture it from a distance.
There is more than one way across. Most of these companies expanded organically, proving the product at home and then standing up a US beachhead. MedAdvisor shows the other route: acquire an American incumbent and inherit its scale and relationships overnight. Both can work. The acquisition path is faster and buys instant reach, but it is expensive, it lands you with an integration job, and it does not guarantee the result follows the headline.
The regulator giveth and taketh away. The same lighter touch that makes Australia a good proving ground makes the US a hard landing. The TGA and Europe's CE marking tend to clear digital health and AI products faster than the FDA. Harrison.ai has more than 250 findings cleared outside the US and has been vocal about the gap. In late 2025 it petitioned the FDA to ease review for established developers. The agency rejected it in April 2026.
It is not a clean win. Superpower has been hit with a lawsuit from a US competitor over its advertising and testing claims, the kind of aggressive litigation that is far more common there than at home. Heidi, for all its growth and success, has faced public criticism over reliability and a sharp price rise as it scaled. MedAdvisor built enormous American reach and still saw its share price fall hard. The US rewards speed and ambition, but it punishes companies that outrun their own quality or pay too much for scale, and it is more litigious, more crowded and more expensive than Australia. A failed or overpriced US expansion does not just burn cash. It burns the year of management attention and credibility that went with it.
Where this leaves you
The winners go deliberately, not hopefully. They prove the model where it is cheap to prove, pick a clear beachhead, put real people on the ground, and buy local knowledge and relationships rather than assuming the product will sell itself. The companies that treat the US as a destination to be earned tend to make it. The ones that treat it as a logo on a slide tend to come home.
It works in both directions. The same discipline that takes an Australian company into America is what takes an international company into Australia. Knowledge and network beat headcount, and a deliberate entry beats a hopeful one, whichever way across the Pacific you are heading.
Terry Cornick is a healthtech strategist and the founder of Clinical Advisors. This analysis draws on publicly available information and company announcements current as of June 2026. Reach out here to discuss your market entry, in either direction.
