The ANZ healthtech graveyard: What 187 dead companies tell us about the market
Building a healthtech company in Australia and New Zealand is hard. Not "hard like a competitive market" hard. Hard like "you need clinical validation, regulatory approval, GP buy-in, hospital procurement cycles, insurer alignment, and a Medicare item number just to get started" hard.
The graveyard tab 🪦 on our ANZ Healthtech Directory now lists 187 companies that didn't make it (we are certain there are more but bear with us). Closed, acquired, merged, or simply gone dark. Some you'll recognise. Most you won't. And that's kind of the point.
What failed and why
The single biggest category in the graveyard is telehealth. Dozens of GP and urgent care platforms launched between 2018 and 2022 riding the COVID wave, raised modest rounds, and quietly disappeared once MBS telehealth billing tightened and the big players consolidated the market. If you didn't have a differentiated clinical model or a locked-in patient cohort by mid-2023, you were done.
Mental health is the second graveyard cluster. The demand was real, the funding was there, but the path to sustainable revenue wasn't. Medicare Better Access sessions are capped. Private pay is price-sensitive. Employers talk a big game about EAP but procurement is slow and budgets are small. A lot of well-intentioned platforms built good products and ran out of road before they could scale.
The medicinal cannabis space is also quietly thinning. What looked like a gold rush in 2021 and 2022 attracted a wave of telehealth clinics with near-identical models. Regulatory tightening, TGA scrutiny, and a crowded market have already claimed several. More will likely follow.
The structural problem
Most of these companies didn't fail because the idea was bad. They failed because the ANZ healthtech market has a brutal combination of characteristics that punishes undercapitalised startups: fragmented procurement, long sales cycles, conservative clinical buyers, and a Medicare billing system that rewards incumbents and makes it genuinely difficult to build sustainable unit economics around new care models.
A GP won't change their practice management software without a trial period, an implementation budget, and sign-off from their colleagues and practice manager. A hospital won't deploy a diagnostic tool without a peer-reviewed evidence base and an ethics approval. An insurer won't integrate a new platform without a commercial and clinical governance framework that takes 18 months to negotiate. None of this is unreasonable. All of it is brutal for a startup burning runway.
What the graveyard tells us
A few things. The market is real, in the majority of cases these companies weren't chasing phantom demand. The timing was often right. The capital was frequently insufficient. And the go-to-market strategy, in many cases, underestimated how long it takes to change clinical behaviour in Australia.
The companies that survived, and the ones being built now that will survive, are the ones that found a wedge into an existing workflow, solved a specific billing or compliance pain point, or landed an enterprise contract early enough to buy themselves time.
The graveyard isn't a failure of the sector. It's evidence the sector is maturing. You just had to be capitalised well enough to be around for it. And as much as success leaves clues, so does failure, so pay attention.
The ANZ Healthtech Graveyard is part of the ANZ Healthtech Directory, available on the Clinical Advisors website here (just click the “Graveyard” tab).
