Built out of New York City’s Foremost Venture Community, Terrarium will Accelerate and De-Risk Pathways for Founders; Launches in Partnership with Cactus and Wellstar Health System; Announces Launch of First Startup, Rota Health
NEW YORK, Feb. 19, 2025 — Company Ventures, the premier startup talent ecosystem in New York City, today announced the launch of Terrarium, a new venture studio to incubate healthcare technology startups, in partnership with Cactus, a premier innovation-focused advisory firm working with many of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S.
Terrarium will provide an accelerated and de-risked pathway for founders to build new companies by combining best-in-class research, talent, capital, and deep industry relationships. The studio aims to incubate up to ten companies over the next three years by taking a thesis-driven, research-intensive approach focused on segments of healthcare that are being transformed by technology and regulatory pressure.
The -1 to 0 phase is often the hardest and most risky part of the startup journey with founders spending up to two years bootstrapping their companies. Terrarium accelerates this process by testing and validating multiple ideas before funding each incubation. “When founders join a Terrarium incubation, they are armed with the market validation and capital to build the next wave of great health tech companies,” said Mark Rosenblun, CEO of Terrarium.
The company is taking a more talent-centric approach to the studio model. “First and foremost, Terrarium incubations will be remarkably founder friendly from an ownership perspective. As we’ve seen for over ten years, companies succeed for a number of reasons, but chief among them is the caliber of talent on the core team,” said Nelson Schubart, managing partner at Company Ventures. “We have invested in a data-driven talent platform to find and attract the most exceptional entrepreneurs.”
“With signs of a capital investment boom in digital health and myriad compelling applications for AI across the healthcare sector, the timing is right,” said Matthew Harrigan, CEO, Company Ventures. “The opportunity for advancement in technology adoption in healthcare to impact lives is vast. Terrarium will build on Company Ventures’ successful track record in digital health which includes investments in Maven, Centivo, Octave, and Stepful and benefit from our deep network of existing co-investor relationships from downstream capital, our start-up ecosystem and founder network, and our proprietary technology.”
Terrarium was conceived in partnership with Cactus. “We partnered with Company Ventures to launch Terrarium as a smarter alternative for Health Systems to invest in venture: a less capital-intensive and de-risked model that brings the best minds in the venture community into direct collaboration with health system leaders,” said Noah Waxman, CEO of Cactus. “Cactus brings deep knowledge of U.S. health systems’ innovation agendas, strong relationships inside those organizations, and a clear understanding of which opportunities should be pursued in-house versus those best served by new, venture backed businesses.”
Terrarium is also announcing a strategic partnership with Wellstar, a Georgia health system with an expansive network that includes 11 hospitals, 5 health parks, 300+ medical office locations, numerous specialty centers, and Catalyst by Wellstar, the system’s innovation and venture arm.
“Wellstar’s deep clinical and healthcare expertise uniquely positions our team to accelerate the timeline to positively impact patients and communities with early-stage technologies,” said Hank Capps, M.D. FAAFP, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer, Wellstar Health System, and president of Catalyst. “We sit closest to the patient which empowers Catalyst to bridge the gap between groundbreaking technology and real-world clinical application. By collaborating with Terrarium, we can provide invaluable insights, validation, and pathways for startups shaping the future of healthcare.”
The studio’s first incubation, Rota Health, aims to solve the massive problem of data interoperability in healthcare, which represents 30% of all data in the world. The company’s AI-enabled data integration platform allows healthcare organizations to seamlessly connect and analyze disparate datasets across organizations.
“Healthcare data integration is a hair-on-fire problem with a $50B unserved market,” said John Ciccio, co-founder and CEO, Rota Health. “Large healthcare enterprises are integrating with hundreds of external tech vendors which is becoming untenable even for the most sophisticated organizations. I chose to work with Terrarium because of the tremendous potential to disrupt the healthcare integration market and their impressive network of top-tier talent.”
About Terrarium
Terrarium is a venture studio seeding the next wave of transformational healthcare technology companies. The company was launched in 2024 out of Company Ventures, the premier startup talent ecosystem in New York City. Terrarium incubates companies from -1 to 0 by combining best-in-class research, talent, capital & deep industry relationships. For more information, visit us at Terrarium and follow us on LinkedIn.
SOURCE Terrarium
