Body and health monitoring device on a person's wrist.

CDL Health

Health & Wellness

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For early-stage founders bringing wellness, medical technology, digital health, and healthcare platform innovations to market.

The Health & Wellness Stream at CDL-Wisconsin focuses on enhancing well-being and improving resilience through preventing, diagnosing and treating medical conditions by helping technical teams bring their human health innovations to market through the advice and guidance of accomplished entrepreneurs, experienced operators, doctors, scientists, engineers, and investors in the life sciences domain.
Accepted startups attend up to five sessions between October and June to sharpen business objectives, prioritize time and resources, potentially raise capital, and engage with experts working on the frontiers of research. CDL is a non-profit organization. There are no fees for participation, and CDL does not take any equity. Learn more about the CDL program here.

Who Should Apply?

The Health & Wellness Stream is particularly suited to companies focused on improving the quality, speed, cost, or accessibility of health care, in service of preventing, diagnosing, or treating medical conditions or improving the operational efficiency of the medical community. This stream is tailored towards early-stage companies (early venture or growth) or even projects (pre-incorporation); however, startups at all levels of maturity will be considered.

Example Innovation Areas

  • Medical Imaging/Devices
  • Diagnostics/Diagnostic Platforms
  • Telehealth and Remote Monitoring
  • Machine Intelligence in Healthcare
  • Preventive and Personalized Healthcare
  • Mobile Medical Applications
  • Computational Drug Discovery Methods
  • Revenue Cycle Management
  • New Business Models in Healthcare Delivery
  • Patient Data/Relationship Management

The list above is not exhaustive. Contact cdl-wisconsin@creativedestructionlab.com to discuss the program and your venture with someone from the CDL-Wisconsin Health & Wellness Stream.

Our Mentors

CDL mentors include accomplished entrepreneurs, experienced operators, active angel and venture investors, world-leading scientists, engineers, and technologists. Mentors meet every eight weeks to help founders set objectives over the program’s nine-month duration. Mentor and venture relationships are built through CDL-engineered interactions and, in some cases, extend beyond the program through ongoing advisory roles.

See all CDL Health mentors ▶︎

For more information or to schedule an introduction meeting with the CDL team, email cdl-wisconsin@creativedestructionlab.com

“I have been involved with countless programs to mentor entrepreneurs over the years, but nothing like this. It starts with the quality of people you have attracted and their commitment to involvement. It is intense, and fast paced, and I always feel like I gain more from the other mentors than I give.”

John Neis

Executive Managing Director of Venture Investors of Wisconsin

“Entrepreneurship is a critical ingredient to enable new innovations to reach the people who would most benefit. We’re seeing this with the pandemic and the massive acceleration to telehealth and other technologies. We’re enthusiastic about working with CDL to both share insights from our experts and to learn from the entrepreneurs and business mentors who are building the next generation of high-impact health and wellness tech companies.”

Richard Davidson

William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, director of the Center for Healthy Minds and president of the affiliated nonprofit Healthy Minds Innovations

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