Turquoise Health snags $40M

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Turquoise Health Snags $40M

The moolah
San Diego-based startup Turquoise Health closed a $40 million Series C financing round on Tuesday, bringing the company's overall fundraising total to $95 million. The round was led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Adams Street Partners and Yosemite.

Tackling contracts
Turquoise, founded in 2020, originally built its business around collecting and analyzing price transparency data from hospital and payer disclosures. Providers used that data primarily for benchmarking and contract negotiations, said CEO Chris Severn.

With its new funding, the startup plans to move beyond analyzing healthcare prices and into facilitating the transactions themselves. Severn highlighted Turquoise's contract management platform as a major part of this strategy.

The platform allows providers and payers to manage all their negotiated agreements directly within one place. Because healthcare payment rules are encoded in those contracts, bringing them onto the platform makes it easier to standardize language and simplify how prices are calculated, Severn explained.

That, in turn, can make price transparency data cleaner and help patients see more reliable upfront prices, he added. Turquoise said more than 40 customers are already using the contract platform, including UNC Health and Loma Linda University Health.

What about other revenue cycle tools?
Severn argued that many revenue cycle tools focus on identifying problems after claims are processed, such as denials or underpayments. He thinks Turquoise differentiates itself by tackling the core issue.

"Turquoise is unique is our focus on taking the waste attributed to a contract and actually working on making language better — versus a lot of companies in revenue cycle that just take the contract at face value and say, 'Hey, these are your denials, these are the zero pays, this is where the system calculator broke.' They'll help you collect those denials, but they're not looking at the root and saying, 'We'll help you fix that contract,'" Severn remarked.

— By Katie Adams

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Another FDA Rejection for Aldeyra's Dry Eye Drug

Third time, no charm for Aldeyra
The FDA turned down Aldeyra Therapeutics' submission seeking approval for reproxalap, an eye drop developed to treat dry eye disease. The negative regulatory decision follows FDA rejections for the drug in 2023 and 2025.

The drug
Reproxalap is a small molecule designed to target reactive aldehyde species (RASP), molecules that the body produces in response to infection, injury, or other triggers. RASP contributes to inflammation, including inflammation associated with dry eye disease. Reproxalap binds to RASP and leads to its degradation in the body.

The moolah
In 2023, AbbVie paid $1 million for an exclusive option to collaborate on reproxalap. The pharma company has since paid an additional $5 million to extend the exercise period. If AbbVie exercises its option, it would pay Aldeyra $100 million up front and up to $300 million more in milestone payments. The companies would share in U.S. commercialization of the drug while AbbVie would handle commercialization in the rest of the world.

What happened?
Reproxalap's long and rocky regulatory history is characterized by FDA rejections, additional clinical trials, and resubmissions leading to more rejections. In the latest one, the FDA highlighted inconsistencies regarding the various clinical tests, telling the company the "totality of evidence from the completed clinical trials does not support the effectiveness of the product." Aldeyra said it will request a meeting with the FDA to learn what is needed for its drug to secure regulatory approval.

—By Frank Vinluan

Nadia Care Raises $12M

The news
Nadia Care raised $12 million in funding to expand its community-centered maternal care, the startup announced on Monday.

The company
The maternal health company is formerly known as Cayaba Care and offers care coordination, benefits navigation, prenatal support, labor and birth support, lactation support, nutrition counseling, mental health and postpartum care. The services are provided in the home, virtually and in the community (like a coffee shop or Walmart parking lot). Nadia Care's support is delivered by maternity navigators, registered nurses, doulas, lactation consultants and nutritionists.

The funding
Nadia Care's $12 million round was led by Valtruis and a national payer, with participation from First Trust Capital Partners and RH Capital. The company declined to share the name of the payer.

Soundbite
"We believe the core of what is broken in maternal care is trust. We hear this directly from our members — women who have experienced real disrespect and dismissal from the healthcare system," said Adaeze Enekwechi, CEO of Nadia Care. "They have traveled across town on two buses to get to a prenatal appointment, only to be greeted with accusations rather than care. No one should face pregnancy like that. What is normal in communities around the world is having support: people around you, caring for you, showing up for you. We are trying to operationalize that empathy into the American healthcare system."

— By Marissa Plescia

When Recalls Fail — The Gap Between Notification and Action

Recalls don't always create a hard stop
When a medical device defect is identified, products are removed from use, hospitals are notified, and patients are protected. At least, that is how the system is designed to work. In reality, recalled products can remain available — not because of absence of a recall, the concealment of risk or staff failure, but because recalled devices are not fully removed from clinical inventory and are later implanted in patients.

Why does this happen?
Today, recalls are still managed through paper letters, emails, spreadsheets, and siloed databases. When a recall is issued, hospitals rarely have immediate certainty about whether affected products are actually on their shelves. Clinical and supply chain teams are forced into a manual process: pulling reports, checking physical inventory, tracing lot and batch numbers, and reconciling recall notices against stock that may already be moving. This is a structural limitation of the tools in use today, and it creates a patient safety gap that manual processes cannot reliably close.

Recall infrastructure is needed
In a networked recall system, the goal is straightforward but ambitious: ensure that recalls cannot exist only as notices. Instead, they become actionable, trackable, auditable events that connect manufacturers, distributors, providers, inventory, and patients within a single system. It provides shared infrastructure and a single source of truth for recall communication, acknowledgment, and action. Most importantly, recalled products are far less likely to slip through the cracks.

— By MedCity Influencer Guillermo Ramas

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Turquoise Health snags $40M