For healthtech startups

Healthtech app development for startups that ship

You have the clinical insight, the market, and the will. What you don't have is six months to assemble a compliant engineering team. We bring the technology, the capital, and a senior team — and we take skin in the game, so your win is our win.

The early-stage healthtech reality

Most digital-health startups don't fail on the idea. They stall on the build — too slow, too expensive, or non-compliant in ways that surface at the worst time.

Assembling a team eats your runway

Hiring senior healthcare engineers takes months and burns the runway you needed for the build itself. Agencies bill by the hour with no stake in the outcome, and a lone contractor can't cover product, design, mobile, backend, security, and DevOps. By the time the team is real, the window has moved.

Compliance bolted on later is expensive

HIPAA, SOC 2, and patient-data architecture are cheap to design in and painful to retrofit. Teams that treat compliance as a launch-week task end up re-architecting data flows, re-signing vendor BAAs, and rebuilding auth — often right when they're trying to close a pilot or raise.

You can't afford to guess on architecture

The decisions you make in month one — data model, EHR strategy, hosting, auth — set the ceiling on how far you can scale and how fast you can move. A wrong turn here is the kind of technical debt that quietly caps the company a year later.

How Alternova builds with founders

A hybrid model designed for founders who know how to sell. We don't just build — we invest in you.

Skin in the game

We work on SAFE / equity-aligned deals, not just hourly billing. That means we're optimizing for your product succeeding in market, not for hours logged. We bring capital alongside the build so your runway goes further.

A senior team, day one

Product management, design, frontend, backend, mobile, game development, security, and DevOps — covered by an AI-enhanced senior team that ships ~5x the output per developer. No ramp-up, no juniors learning healthcare on your dime.

Compliance from the first commit

HIPAA, SOC 2, FHIR/HL7, and patient-data architecture are our defaults, not a phase. We design the data flows, encryption, audit logging, and BAAs so you're audit-ready and pilot-ready from the start.

From concept to launch — and beyond

We partner at every stage: validate the concept, build the MVP on a scalable, compliant architecture, then maintain and grow it. You leave each stage with a working product and a clear path, not a handoff and a goodbye.

Work we're proud of

100+ apps shipped for founders, clinical researchers, and institutions like UCSF and Essity.

Backpack

MVP through production for a pediatric mental-health platform — telehealth, assessments, and interactive bibliotherapy on a scalable, compliant architecture.

Ace (UCSF)

A cognitive-assessment videogame built with UCSF — research-grade software that real institutions trust with real data.

Questions founders ask

Do you take equity instead of payment?

Our model is a hybrid — SAFE / equity-aligned deals for founders, so our incentives match yours. The exact structure depends on stage and scope; we figure it out together on a discovery call.

Can you build my MVP if I'm not technical?

Yes. Many founders we work with bring deep clinical or commercial insight and no engineering team. We cover product, design, and the full technical build, and we translate — you don't need to speak DevOps.

How fast can you ship an MVP?

Faster than assembling a team from scratch. Our senior, AI-enhanced team ships roughly 5x the output per developer, and we scope to the shortest path to a real, compliant product — weeks to a first version, not quarters.

Do you handle HIPAA and compliance?

It's our default. We design HIPAA, SOC 2, and FHIR/HL7 considerations into the architecture from day one, including encryption, audit logging, and Business Associate Agreements across your stack.

What stage do you work with?

Pre-seed through Series A startups, plus clinical researchers and institutions. If you're exploring an idea or ready to grow, we can meet you where you are — start with the application or a consulting session.

Related

Build your vision with a team that has skin in the game

Tell us what you're building. We'll bring the technology, the capital, and the team — from application to launch in weeks, not months.

Apply to build with us