3/647 → 15/1165; +0.82 percentage points of formation share.
What used to mean "video call with a doctor" has splintered into a set of narrow, condition-specific pipelines that only nominally resemble each other: Ophelia treats opioid withdrawal, twoplus fertility ships an at-home conception device, Comet Health handles pelvic floor therapy, and My NextDerma routes acne cases to dermatologists in Mexico, each one owning prescription, diagnosis, and fulfillment for a single vertical rather than acting as a general front door to care. That verticalization is why the category is compounding at 2.78x while the broader "Digital Health" and "Consumer Health and Wellness" formations sit at 0.41x and 0.43x, the growth is concentrated in companies that picked one narrow, high-friction problem and automated the entire loop around it, not in platforms trying to be everyone's front door. AIOS makes that ambition explicit, framing telemedicine as an AI operating system meant to compress human time toward zero, while infrastructure players like Akute Health and Equipt Health quietly supply the EMR and device-logistics rails that let the narrow clinical products scale without building operations from scratch. The adjacent "Diagnostic Testing" formation is growing almost as fast, at 2.01x, and companies like Tuli Health and Quadrant Eye sit right at that seam, turning pharmacies and home devices into diagnostic endpoints rather than just consultation channels. The open question, visible in the live work on cross-provider clinical-agent handoff, is what happens to accountability once these narrow AI-driven pipelines start passing patients between communication, prescription, and human review, since each handoff is a point where responsibility can quietly evaporate. None of this scales the way it does now without the 2022 to 2023 wave of production-grade large language models capable enough to draft clinical notes and triage messages with reasonable reliability, which is what let single-condition teams like Ophelia and Bristle promise near-automated care loops instead of just video infrastructure.
Clinical agents can move work between patient communication, records, trials, and human review, but responsibility and context may fragment at every handoff.
Trace real clinical-agent workflows across systems and organizations to identify where context, approval, responsibility, and outcome evidence are lost.
Ophelia, Terapify, and DocVita's mental health marketplace angle show a repeated sub-pattern of mental health telemedicine; as volume grows, matching therapists to patients and navigating insurance reimbursement becomes a distinct infrastructure problem separate from general telehealth.
Check back around May 2027 for new YC batches, to see whether independent evidence for "Mental-health-specific telemedicine infrastructure (therapist matching, insurance billing)" has appeared.
Companies like RingMD (spanning multiple Asian markets with government partnerships), DocVita (India), and Terapify (LatAm) are each building consumer-facing telehealth in fragmented regulatory environments; vertical-specific players like Ophelia (addiction medicine) and twoplus fertility face state-by-state prescribing and care rules that become a shared bottleneck.
Check back around August 2027 for new YC batches, to see whether independent evidence for "Multi-state/multi-country telehealth licensing and compliance infrastructure" has appeared.
The cluster is fragmenting into hyper-specific verticals (Bristle for dental, My NextDerma for dermatology, Equipt Health for sleep, twoplus for fertility), each likely needing specialized documentation, device integration, and billing workflows that generic EHRs don't serve.
Check back around June 2027 for new YC batches, to see whether independent evidence for "Narrow-vertical clinical backend/EHR tooling for niche telemedicine" has appeared.
InpharmD (AI for pharmacy/drug info) and Quadrant Eye (AI, deep learning, digital health) suggest telemedicine visit data is becoming a substrate for AI diagnostic/decision tools, a natural next layer once enough consult volume exists across DocVita, Terapify, Rinse, etc.
Check back around August 2027 for new YC batches, to see whether independent evidence for "AI-driven clinical decision support layered on telemedicine data" has appeared.
Included in YC's Telemedicine membership during the measured recent window.
Included in YC's Telemedicine membership during the measured recent window.
Included in YC's Telemedicine membership during the measured recent window.
Included in YC's Telemedicine membership during the measured recent window.
Included in YC's Telemedicine membership during the measured recent window.
Included in YC's Telemedicine membership during the measured recent window.
Included in YC's Telemedicine membership during the measured recent window.
Included in YC's Telemedicine membership during the measured recent window.
Included in YC's Telemedicine membership during the measured recent window.
Included in YC's Telemedicine membership during the measured recent window.
A primary internal company segment within Telemedicine, derived deterministically from the shared yc industry “Consumer Health and Wellness”. This is a classification of current window members, not a causal layer or a separate time trend.
Measured-window members of Telemedicine that could not be assigned to a narrower shared YC tag or industry without forcing a classification.
A primary internal company segment within Telemedicine, derived deterministically from the shared yc tag “Digital Health”. This is a classification of current window members, not a causal layer or a separate time trend.
No comparable outside activity is connected yet.
Cambrian Signal, “Telemedicine,” publication yc-2026-10-02-semantic-v8, snapshot October 2, 2026.
cambrian.jafar.com/formation/telemedicine