Happy Sunday!
The Texas Stock Exchange picked up a big name this week.
Dillard’s moved its stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange to Dallas-based TXSE on October 5, ending nearly 60 years of trading in New York. The Arkansas-based department store chain gives the new exchange a high-profile early adopter as Texas continues its push to become a major financial center.
This week’s deals are below. Look out for an $8B move by SpaceX that could put it in competition with the big wireless carriers, a $4.2B acquisition in the Eagle Ford region, and a $775M investment in a Houston company supplying power to energy-hungry AI data centers.
Tiny Health Raises $33M to Build Clinician Trust Through Published Evidence
Austin-based Tiny Health announced a $33 million oversubscribed Series B on September 29, led by B Capital, with participation from existing investors including Spero Ventures. Total funding now stands at $46 million, and B Capital’s Nick Whitehead joins the board. No valuation was disclosed, though CEO Cheryl Sew Hoy said it is well above the Series A. Tiny Health is pursuing clinical adoption through published evidence rather than regulatory clearance, and the proceeds are directed accordingly: clinical research, expansion of its provider channel, an AI engine called TinyAI, and increasing headcount.
Founded in 2020, Tiny Health launched in 2022 with a gut microbiome test for babies and mothers built around the first 1,000 days of life, when the microbiome is most malleable. Adult testing has since surpassed pediatric volume, and the company says it serves nearly 200,000 customers. Revenue was not disclosed, but Sew Hoy said it has more than doubled each year, and Tiny Health ranked No. 208 on this year’s Inc. 5000 with 1,624 percent three-year growth.
The company positions itself as a wellness product. “We are a wellness test,” Sew Hoy told Crunchbase News, “not a diagnostic.” Insurance does not cover it, and the test identifies which microbes are present without establishing what causes a person’s symptoms. Staying outside FDA clearance and reimbursement costs Tiny Health payer revenue, but it lets the company sell cash-pay and through practitioners without a regulatory timeline. It also leaves the category without a regulatory gate, which makes published evidence one of the few ways to separate one microbiome test from another.
Tiny Health says it is the only gut microbiome company with a published interventional randomized controlled trial. The 2025 study in Pediatric Allergy and Immunology found that a microbiome-based intervention cut the odds of eczema by 83 percent in infants born by C-section. A second trial is underway, research is expanding into IBD, menopause, GLP-1s and oncology drug response, and a $5 million Microbiome Research Program will give outside researchers access to its testing and data.
The practitioner channel is where that evidence is intended to drive adoption. Powered by Tiny, which sells testing to healthcare providers and to companies that build it into their own services, grew fourfold last year and counts Fullscript, Superpower and Mayo Clinic’s Executive Health and Longevity Programs among dozens of partners, reaching more than 6,000 practitioners. The channel grew from the consumer side: customers took results to their doctors, and doctors began asking Tiny how to read them. Whitehead, the round’s lead investor at B Capital, said clinicians consulted in diligence rated Tiny’s test highest. Viome, by comparison, pairs testing with its own supplements, while Tiny Health supplies testing to other platforms.
The strategy depends on whether the evidence extends to adults. The published trial is in infants, while adult testing now exceeds pediatric volume, so the adult research the company has planned matters most. Watch whether the second trial replicates the eczema result, whether adult studies show outcomes and not only associations, and whether Powered by Tiny becomes a larger share of revenue, a figure the company has not disclosed. If the evidence stays pediatric while volume stays adult, the wellness label will limit how far the clinical channel can go.
Analysis by the pH Partners Team
pH Partners is an Austin-based boutique investment bank focused on Healthcare, Technology, and Consumer markets. Learn more at phpartners.com
Deal Activity
Austin
Nous Research, a developer of open-source AI models and agents for enterprise deployment, raised $90M in a Series B led by Robot Ventures with participation from NVIDIA, M12, Samsung Electronics, Union Square Ventures, and others. Approximately $160M raised to date.
