Nashville’s heath tech startup scene is booming. Here’s why.

On a flight from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this month, 36-year-old Robin Shah settled into his seat and ready to crank out some work for his health-tech startup, Thyme Care. 

Founded in 2020, Thyme Care helps cancer patients manage their disease by connecting them with the personalized care and resources they need. Shah, the co-founder and CEO, sports a purple Thyme Care sticker on his water bottle, and it caught the attention of the enterprise capitalist sitting next to him on the plane.

The VC recognized Shah’s company — an occurrence that’s hardly unusual for him anymore. As more investors and founders are flocking to explore Nashville’s booming health-care and technology scene, Shah said he gets recognized repeatedly. Sometimes people know his first and last names. 

“It happens probably every two or three flights,” Shah told CNBC in an interview.   

Nashville is home to greater than 680,000 people, including Shah, who love the town for its Southern charm and small-town vibe. But while the community might feel quaint, Nashville is a titan of the health-care industry. The town supports greater than 900 health-care firms that generate a complete of $97 billion in revenue annually, in line with the Nashville Health Care Council.

Because of this, the town is bursting with opportunities for founders akin to Shah who’re searching for ways to disrupt the industry and redefine the patient experience.

CNBC spoke with a dozen founders, investors and executives in Nashville who described a tight-knit, supportive health-tech community that is growing larger by the day. 

“Great firms are being born here,” Shah said. 

Nicknamed Music City, Nashville is chock-full of country singers and perpetually buzzing with live music. It has also turn out to be a preferred destination for bachelorette parties, so groups of girls, often donning pink or bedazzled cowboy hats, may be seen wandering out and in of bars on the favored street called Broadway. 

But just minutes away from the party vibe on Broadway lies Nashville’s vibrant network of health systems, startups and investment firms. 

The town’s popularity as a health-care hub was catalyzed when HCA Healthcare, certainly one of the primary for-profit hospital firms within the U.S., was founded there in 1968. HCA operates greater than 180 hospitals across 20 states and facilitates greater than 37 million patient encounters annually, in line with its website.

The corporate has helped attract troves of health-care professionals to Nashville, and other organizations quickly followed suit. 

Community Health Systems, which operates 74 acute-care hospitals, Brookdale Senior Living, which runs greater than 670 senior living communities, and Acadia Healthcare, which operates greater than 250 behavioral health facilities, are all headquartered within the greater Nashville area. 

Outstanding higher education institutions akin to Vanderbilt University, including the Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Belmont University; and Meharry Medical College are also based in Nashville.  

“Fundamentally, Nashville is form of the health-care capital of the world. That is how we describe ourselves often,” Kyle Cooksey, chief experience officer at Monogram Health, told CNBC.

Monogram Health, headquartered in a Nashville suburb, offers digital tools that might help patients with conditions akin to chronic kidney disease manage their care from home. The corporate closed a $375 million growth funding round in January, and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist serves as chairman of the board.  

Cooksey said the Nashville startup ecosystem is “incredibly supportive” and mission-driven, and now so entrenched in the town that it’s hard to miss.  

 “You’ll be able to’t literally go a block here without stumbling across a health-care company,” he said.

Because of this, health-care talent and expertise is plentiful in Nashville, which is a considerable perk for founders constructing firms there.  

John Bass, a Nashville native and the CEO of a enterprise studio called Hashed Health, said the town is such a “highly concentrated” environment of health-care professionals that it may well be hard to go away. He founded Hashed Health, which goals to de-risk and spin out health-care startups, in 2016.

Bass said VCs in Nashville are likely to take a practical and conservative approach to investing, which reflects the difficult reality of constructing solutions for the traditionally technology-averse health-care industry. He said innovation on this space requires a careful understanding of regulations and constraints.

Bass said he’s considered trading in Music City for the Rocky Mountains in Colorado but that he’s glad he stayed.

“Moving to a unique city can be fun, but I do not think another town has that very same level of concentrated talent that Nashville has,” Bass told CNBC in an interview. “It still seems like it’s the best size, it hasn’t grown so big that it’s too diluted.”

Ellen Herlacher, a partner on the health-care VC firm LRVHealth, grew up in Nashville and lives in Boston. She said Boston is a powerful city for each academic and clinical innovation in health care, but Nashville is the middle of the health-care business. 

Herlacher travels to Nashville every six to eight weeks to satisfy with portfolio firms and co-investors. Sometimes she makes the trip two weeks in a row. 

Luke Benda, co-founder and CEO of the Nashville-based medical robotics company Healing Innovations, said the town gives founders quick access to the “heavy hitters” of hospital operations, which may be difficult to succeed in, let alone hire, from elsewhere. 

Nonetheless, he said startups also need traditional technologists akin to software developers and engineers, which may be harder to seek out in Nashville.   

The broader tech talent pool has improved in recent times as tech firms akin to Amazon and Oracle have established hubs in Nashville, but Bass said it’s still not all the time easy to seek out true technologists.

Amazon announced it might construct an expansive recent office space in Nashville in 2018 and promised to bring greater than 5,000 corporate and technology jobs to the town. Oracle, which accomplished a deal to purchase the electronic medical records company Cerner in 2022, is constructing its second U.S. headquarters in Nashville for $1.2 billion, in line with The Tennessean. 

“It’s still the truth that you simply’re probably not going to seek out every thing you would like here,” Bass said.

Vanderbilt provided a grant to support the GNVCA’s initial operations, in line with a blog post. 

The GNVCA was capable of launch partly because a “critical mass” of VC firms have now arrange shop in Nashville, said Marcus Whitney, a member of GNVCA’s board and a co-founder and partner of the firm Jumpstart Health Investors. 

Whitney has lived in Nashville for greater than 20 years, but he said the VC and startup ecosystem has modified “drastically” within the last five years. He said the town is attracting recent residents from business hubs on each coasts, including founders, VCs and investment bankers.

“We glance rather a lot more like a tech and innovation hub than we did 10 years ago, that is obviously,” he told CNBC in an interview. 

Nashville can be home to the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, which helps connect startups with the resources and support they need. The middle opened its flagship facility in 2010 after the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce commissioned a 75-person “Entrepreneurship Task Force” in 2007. It has worked with greater than 10,000 entrepreneurs since 2010, in line with its website. 

Benda said the Entrepreneur Center is an “amazing hub” filled with mentors who need to help founders, even when the founders do not know what they’re doing. Landon Gibbs, managing partner at Nashville-based Altitude Ventures, said the middle is the “front door” for entrepreneurship in the town.

“The community is absolutely behind that,” Gibbs said. 

Eligible Nashville entrepreneurs may also turn out to be members of the Greater Nashville Technology Council and the Nashville Health Care Council. The Nashville Health Care Council is made up of greater than 300 firms, including HCA Healthcare, and it offers networking opportunities and academic events. 

Raelyn Wilson, co-founder and CEO of Nashville-based Peer Supply, said there are “constant” social events for the startup community in Nashville, including many which can be very casual. Peer Supply, a platform that helps to enhance health-care supply chains, is Wilson’s first enterprise as a founder. 

“I can not inform you how often people need to grab coffee or grab a glass of wine or something simply to talk in regards to the industry and share lessons learned,” Wilson told CNBC in an interview.