Dive Brief:
- Virtual physical therapy company Hinge Health filed to go public on Monday, signaling the market for digital health initial public offerings may be starting to open.
- The firm narrowed its losses significantly last year, reporting a net loss of $11.9 million compared with $108.1 million in 2023, according to a securities filing. It also posted revenue of $390.4 million in 2024, an increase of more than 33% year over year.
- The IPO comes as filings in digital health have slowed to a crawl in recent years. But the market could be poised for improvement in 2025, experts say.
Dive Insight:
Hinge, a decade-old firm that’s secured hundreds of millions in venture capital investment, offers digital musculoskeletal care and physical therapy, including through an artificial intelligence-backed movement sensor and a wearable device that provides electrical nerve stimulation.
The company largely works with self-insured employers, but Hinge is also starting to offer its services through fully-insured health plans and Medicare Advantage plans, according to a securities filing.
At the end of last year, Hinge had 2,250 clients and more than 532,000 members, the company said. The firm argues the market for musculoskeletal care is huge — for example, nearly 40% of adults reported lower back pain in 2019, according to the CDC.
“Our first decade in business has been focused on physical therapy (PT)—with $70B in estimated annual spend in the United States, PT provides a long runway ahead for our business,” Hinge co-founder and CEO Daniel Perez wrote in a letter to investors. “Over the coming years we’ll continue applying technology to automate other aspects of care, with several new products already in development.”
Hinge hasn’t yet determined the price range or the number of shares that will be offered in the IPO, according to a press release. The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HNGE.
Hinge’s IPO is one of just a few recent digital health filings. Although the number of firms going public soared in 2021, alongside record-breaking venture capital investment in the sector, the digital health IPO market froze soon after.
Only one company went public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in 2022, and zero digital health firms notched a public exit the following year, according to consultancy and VC firm Rock Health.
However, a couple companies, like healthcare payments firm Waystar and precision medicine company Tempus AI, went public in 2024. More firms are likely considering going public this year, experts say. If newly public firms that make the leap in the first half of the year perform well, the second half of 2025 could have more activity, Neil Patel, head of ventures at startup builder Redesign Health, told Healthcare Dive late last year.
“It can’t just be like a one-day, 30-day, 60-day spike in price. It has to be like sustained over some period of time,” he said. “And so just the question is, what’s enough?”
