The biggest US health insurer has a $600 million VC arm that places bets on the future of healthcare. Here are Optum Ventures’ 12 biggest investments.

Like other industry giants, UnitedHealth Group wants to back startups that hope to turn the healthcare industry on its head. 

To get in early, UnitedHealth created Optum Ventures, a corporate venture fund that operates as a separate entity from the biggest health insurer in the United States. The $600 million fund was created in 2017 just as digital health startups were becoming hot investments across Silicon Valley’s traditional venture-capital ecosystem. 

Since its founding, Optum Ventures has invested in 29 companies, a spokesman for the fund confirmed to Business Insider. According to Pitchbook data, the fund regularly participates in multiple funding rounds for its portfolio companies, upping its stake with each successive round. 

Read more: This pitch deck helped telehealth startup Heal raise $100 million and win a major partnership with healthcare giant Humana. Here’s how the deal came to be.

To date, Optum Ventures has participated in blockbuster funding rounds for at-home testing startup LetsGetChecked and at-home urgent care startup Dispatch Health, both of which have raised over $100 million according to Pitchbook data. The Optum spokesman declined to specify how much Optum Ventures contributed to each funding round but confirmed the firm’s participation in the deals.

Corporate investors have been particularly active in the healthcare industry of late, with Google investing $100 million in Amwell on Monday and Humana backing digital health startup Heal with the same amount on August 5.

Several investors told Business Insider that it’s not a surprise to see so many incumbents battling it out for deals given the current environment: many insurers or hospital systems need to add tools such as telehealth or new ways to manage chronic diseases as the coronavirus-induced lockdowns continue to drag on. The easiest way to accomplish that goal, investors said, was to partner with a startup already specializing in those areas instead of attempting to create those services in-house. 

UnitedHealth is a $295 billion healthcare company that operates a health insurer and a pharmacy-benefits manager, runs urgent-care clinics and surgery centers, and provides technology and consulting services to hospitals and other healthcare firms. Optum Ventures is overseen by Larry Renfro, who is also vice chairman of UnitedHealth.

Here are the top 12 deals Optum Ventures, UnitedHealthcare’s $600 million venture fund, has participated in since it was created. The startups are listed by the size of the deals that Optum Ventures participated in, from smallest to largest.