Why Founders Need a Better Start
The earliest stage of a startup’s life is often the most fragile. In healthcare, it’s even more precarious. Regulation is complex, adoption is slow, and access to clinical environments is limited. Many founders spend years just trying to validate an idea—burning time and capital before they even build.
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Terrarium, a new venture studio launched by Company Ventures, Cactus, and Wellstar Health System, was created to change that.
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Instead of waiting for great health tech companies to emerge, Terrarium is building them—faster, smarter, and in closer partnership with the people and systems they’re meant to serve.
Inside the Terrarium Model
Terrarium flips the typical startup model on its head. Founders don’t start with a pitch deck—they start with a problem worth solving, backed by research, industry insight, and a clear path to market.
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Each incubation begins with a thesis: a defined opportunity shaped by healthcare trends, unmet needs, and system-level constraints. The studio team pressure-tests ideas, assembles top talent, and ensures clinical and operational input from day one. Founders then step in to scale what’s already been validated—de-risking the -1 to 0 journey that derails so many promising startups.
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The model is also deeply talent-centric. Terrarium’s proprietary platform identifies and recruits high-performing operators, giving each incubation not just a smart idea, but a world-class team to execute it.
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"We’ve built a model that allows early-stage technologies to plug directly into a health system, be validated, and get on the path to scale—without the red tape that usually slows everything down."
Dr. Hank Capps
EVP & Chief Information and Digital Officer, Wellstar Health System
Venture, Validated: The Health System + Strategy Partnership Behind Terrarium
Before an idea becomes a company, someone needs to understand where the real opportunities lie. That’s where Cactus comes in.
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We work directly with health systems to uncover the most urgent pain points—operational, clinical, and experiential—and translate those into strategic venture theses. Our teams are embedded inside these organizations, not observing from the outside. We know where legacy infrastructure breaks down, where workflows stall, and where patients fall through the cracks. And we know when an idea should be solved internally—or when it deserves to be built as its own venture.
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In Terrarium, we’ve helped design a model that brings those insights upstream. So instead of founders guessing what the market needs, we’re helping build companies from day one around real problems, validated by the systems they’re built to serve.
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And Terrarium isn’t building in a vacuum. With Wellstar Health System as a founding partner, every incubation gains access to frontline insights and real clinical environments.
For health systems, the benefit is clear: influence the startups shaping the future of care without having to build them internally or bet on unproven ventures.
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For founders, it means real-world feedback, rapid validation, and an early foothold in a notoriously tough market.
From Interoperability to Impact
Terrarium’s first incubation, Rota Health, is taking on one of healthcare’s most urgent issues: data integration. With healthcare now representing 30% of the world’s data, systems are overwhelmed by the task of making disparate platforms talk to each other.
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Rota’s AI-enabled integration layer helps organizations unify, analyze, and act on their data—turning complexity into clarity. It’s a perfect example of Terrarium’s thesis-driven approach in action: identify a market failure, validate a solution, and build a company around it with the right team, resources, and system partnerships in place.
A New Chapter for Venture and Care
Terrarium is more than a studio—it’s a new infrastructure for healthcare innovation. One that pairs the urgency of startup building with the depth of system expertise. One that treats health systems not just as buyers, but as collaborators. One that gives visionary founders a better launchpad—and gives patients better solutions, faster.
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At Cactus, we’re excited to help shape what comes next. Because the best ideas in healthcare don’t just need funding. They need a way in.
