Texas Weekly Deal Highlights
August 2, 2026
Happy Sunday!
The biggest Austin deal this week was that of Function, the preventive-health platform that gives members lab panels, full-body imaging, and a mission to help you “live 100 healthy years.”
The company brought in $450 million from General Catalyst, though it wasn’t a conventional equity round. The money comes from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, which bankrolls customer acquisition and gets repaid out of the revenue those customers generate. Function’s $2.5 billion valuation from last November holds, and no equity was diluted.
Function has now raised more than $800 million since 2023 and spent the past year acquiring its way into at-home blood draws, imaging, and supplements.
It was a good week for health diagnostics across the board: Houston’s Simbryo raised $5.25 million for fertility testing, and Austin’s Throne Science raised $10 million for a sensor that tracks your gut health from… inside your toilet.
This week’s full roundup follows a deal update from pH Partners on yet another diagnostic company whose latest deal we reported last month.
Market Update: Baylor Genetics
Baylor Genetics, a precision diagnostics company specializing in genetic testing to guide clinical decision-making in rare disease, pediatric, and reproductive health, announced the closing of a $50M Series B financing round on July 15, 2026. The round was led by Decheng Capital, alongside key strategic and institutional partners H.U. Group Holdings and Baylor College of Medicine, with participation from additional institutional venture investors.
This latest financing is believed to value Baylor Genetics at $491MM, a 1.35x step-up from its previous Series A round completed in March 2025, and underscores growing investor appetite for rare disease genomics as both a clinical diagnostic tool and an emerging data asset for the broader life sciences ecosystem.
This financing round reflects a broader market shift: investors and payers are increasingly aligned on the value of precision diagnostics for rare-disease patients, while partnerships between academic medical centers and industry are building durable, monetizable data assets that extend well beyond the clinic.
pH Partners Perspective
Companies like Baylor Genetics are helping close the diagnostic gap by deploying advanced sequencing technologies such as whole exome sequencing (WES), whole genome sequencing (WGS), and RNA sequencing to shorten what is often referred to as the diagnostic odyssey — the years-long path many rare disease patients travel before receiving an accurate diagnosis that can inform treatment decisions. Patients with the same clinical diagnosis often have different underlying genetic variants.
Genomic data applications across life sciences keep expanding, and the category is growing faster than it is being defined. Consensus estimates put growth in the high-teens CAGR through 2030, driven by biopharma’s shift toward biomarker-driven R&D.
Beyond clinical metrics, Baylor Genetics illustrates how academic-institution partnerships can commercialize genomic and clinical data for biopharma R&D and create a scalable model for pairing nonprofit research IP with outside capital. The academic research infrastructure underlying these partnerships also generates the clinical utility evidence that increasingly informs payer coverage decisions for WES/WGS. Examples of this broader model include Geisinger’s decade-long collaboration with Regeneron and Mayo Clinic’s 2026 data partnership with Merck. Baylor Genetics’ own joint venture, formed in 2015, was an early instance of it.
Broader Context
While venture funding across diagnostics remained under pressure through Q1 2026, according to PitchBook data, capital continues to find operators with established payer coverage and clinical adoption — exactly the profile Baylor Genetics has built.
Baylor Genetics was founded as a joint venture in 2015 between H.U. Group Holdings, a diversified laboratory and diagnostics company headquartered in Japan, and Baylor College of Medicine. It builds on nearly 50 years of genetics leadership at Baylor College of Medicine, tracing back to the 1978 founding of its Department of Molecular and Human Genetics.
As Baylor Genetics CEO Kengo Takishima put it in a recent LinkedIn post, “The promise of a genome-first healthcare system has never been more compelling.”
This latest funding round demonstrates that Baylor Genetics is positioned not merely as a diagnostic provider, but as a critical data engine driving precision medicine.
—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.
Austin
Function Health, a developer of a preventive health platform offering lab testing and full-body medical imaging, raised $450M in a deal led by General Catalyst. $807.60M raised to date.
