The Profile · Health-Tech
Chris
Chris
Altchek
He built a newsroom for millennials, sold it, then went looking for the part of healthcare that happens after you leave the building.
He built a newsroom for millennials, sold it, then went looking for the part of healthcare that happens after you leave the building.
Most of healthcare's attention goes to the hospital - the building, the beds, the moment a patient walks in. Chris Altchek built a company around the other ninety percent of life, the days between visits, when a person with heart failure or diabetes is at home and nobody is watching the numbers. Cadence, the company he founded in 2019, takes that monitoring off the physician's plate and turns a flood of remote readings into something a care team can actually act on.
It is a strange company for a former media founder to build, until you learn the family he comes from. By his own account he is surrounded by clinicians - an anesthesiologist, an orthopedic surgeon, an OB-GYN. He spent his twenties as far from that world as possible: a Goldman Sachs analyst, then a media entrepreneur running a publication built for people under thirty. Medicine was the family business he kept declining to join.
Then he sold that media company, sat still for a while, and joined a venture firm to figure out what came next. The answer turned out to be the thing he had been raised inside all along.
It is easier to make transformative change than incremental change.- Chris Altchek, on why he builds for the big swing
In 2011, Altchek and Jake Horowitz - friends since their New York high-school days - launched PolicyMic. The pitch was simple and a little audacious: serious news and argument, made for a generation everyone else was writing off as distracted. It grew up into Mic, one of the defining millennial media brands of the decade, the kind of place that turned politics and identity into shareable, sharply designed stories.
By January 2014 the two founders were on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Altchek was the operator and CEO; the company chased scale, raised venture money, and rode the same platform-traffic wave that lifted - and later sank - a whole class of digital publishers.
Mic was sold to Bustle Digital Group in 2018 after a painful round of layoffs. It was not a fairytale ending, and Altchek has been candid that the exit sent him into a period of genuine reflection rather than a victory lap. What he took from it was less a media playbook than a habit of building around a mission big enough to pull a team forward.
The problem Altchek set out to solve is a paradox of modern medicine. Remote monitoring devices generate enormous volumes of data - blood pressure, glucose, weight, vitals - and standard programs tend to dump all of it back on the physician. More data, more alerts, more work. Cadence's bet is that the technology should absorb that burden, not pass it along.
The company partners with health systems as their enterprise remote-monitoring arm, pairing software with its own clinical staff to manage patients with conditions like congestive heart failure, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and COPD. The platform, named Sync, is meant to do exactly what the word implies: keep patient, data and care team moving together. Altchek frames virtual care as a complement to in-person medicine, not a replacement for it.
Cadence emerged publicly in 2021 with early funding and a partnership with Lifepoint Health, then kept signing large systems.
In December 2021 Coatue led a $100M Series B, with General Catalyst and Thrive Capital, pushing the valuation past $1 billion.
Providence, RUSH, BayCare, Community Health Systems, Lifepoint and Ardent are among the systems that have worked with Cadence.
Zip codes should not determine life expectancy.- The line that explains why Cadence chases rural and underserved care
For a fuller sense of how Altchek thinks about data, doctors and the limits of the hospital building, these conversations are a good place to start.