💸 Here’s how much digital health CEOs make in 2025

Plus: I talk to the Prenuvo CEO about winning over the skeptics

Jul 24, 2025

Hi readers,

You’ll notice this newsletter and my charts are getting a glow-up. As we hone in on the cover design for my upcoming book, Massively Better Healthcare, I’ll be moving my content to live under one cohesive brand. I’m currently building out a new website that will be home to what I’m envisioning as a “mini digital health MBA”. Stay tuned for more.

In the meantime, you can still find an archive of blog posts here and here. If you’ve found this work helpful, please press the little heart button above to share some love ❤️.

In health,
Halle

Here’s How Much Digital Health CEOs Make In 2025

When you’re building a company, there’s always the question of how much you should pay yourself. The best way to fairly answer that question? Look at actual data.

I teamed up with my friends at J.Thelander Consulting to look at the compensation data, including both salary and equity, broken down by the amount of capital raised and industry.

Today, I’ll walk you through what digital health CEO compensation looks like in 2025, how it has changed over the last few years, and how it compares to tech and biotech.

Note: Companies in the survey self-identify into categories including “digital health” and “healthcare IT”. We combined the two groups under the umbrella of “digital health” for this dataset.

Cash compensation depends on how much (and when) you raise

Across both tech and healthcare, CEO salaries scale with the amount the company has raised. In this dataset, CEOs at companies that have raised between $15–50 million (“mid-stage”) make 71% more in cash compensation than those at companies that have raised less than $15 million (“eary-stage”).

The gap between what early-stage and mid-stage CEOs make is widening. In 2021, the median salary difference was $50,000. Today, it’s nearly tripled to $150,000. That likely reflects growing expectations for mid-stage companies to have meaningful revenue and operational scale before raising larger rounds of funding. Meanwhile, early-stage founders are staying leaner for longer.

Early-stage CEOs (<$15M raised)

For companies that have raised less than $15 million, the median cash comp in 2025 is $204,500, with the 75th percentile at $271,260. That’s down 13% from the 2022 peak of $235,000.

Mid-stage CEOs ($15M–$50M raised)

For companies that have raised between $15 million and $50 million, median cash comp jumps to $350,000, with the 75th percentile at $493,750. That’s up 27% from 2021, when the median was $275,000.

One thing that stood out to me is that, even in a tighter fundraising environment, mid-stage CEO salaries are still rising. One reason might be that it’s simply harder to raise capital right now—so the companies that are raising tend to have stronger revenue. That added traction may give boards more flexibility to support higher salaries.

Equity is still where most of the upside lives

Of course, salary is just one piece of the equation. Most founders take far less cash than they could make elsewhere because they’re earning equity they hope will be worth something down the line.

The J. Thelander data breaks down equity ownership by whether the CEO is a founder or was hired into the role. Not surprisingly, founder-CEOs own more of the company than hired CEOs.

At the early stage, founder-CEOs hold a median of about 25%. By the mid stage, that drops to 14.7%. Hired CEOs start with a median of 10% at the early stage, which falls to 6% at the mid stage.

This is a pretty steep drop-off, but it reflects how deals are structured. Startups trade ownership for access to capital. As companies raise more funding and valuations increase, founder (and employee and angel investor) equity gets diluted. But that dilution usually reflects progress—capital raised, team built, product launched, revenue generated. If the company eventually succeeds, even a smaller piece of a very large pie can be quite meaningful.

For hired CEOs, the tradeoff is different. They typically get a solid equity stake without bearing the same early risk, but their upside is often capped by how late they joined and how much capital the company has already raised. Still, for both founders and hired executives, equity remains the primary lever for wealth creation, and the biggest reason to bet on a high-growth company in healthcare.

How digital health CEO comp compares to tech and biotech

So how does digital health stack up against other sectors? At the early stage, digital health CEOs earn the lowest median salary at $204,500, compared to $225,000 in biotech and $250,000 in tech. But by the mid-stage, that flips: digital health CEOs earn $350,000—more than their peers in tech ($260,000) and only slightly behind biotech ($365,750).

While digital health CEOs may start with leaner paychecks, compensation ramps up meaningfully as companies scale. It also reflects capital intensity: digital health may require less upfront investment than biotech, but once companies reach mid-stage traction, salaries start to align with broader healthcare executive norms.

Compensation is always a moving target, but seeing real data helps founders and operators calibrate expectations and make smarter decisions. Whether you're early in the journey or scaling up, it’s worth knowing what others in your shoes are actually earning. I hope this was helpful!

This is not a sponsored post - I’m a real customer via companies I work with, and grateful Thelander let me share this data. If you want access to real-time comp data like this, Thelander runs a no-cost Private Company Compensation Survey for founders and investors. The data is fully customizable and focused only on private companies, so you can actually compare apples to apples.

Read more:

Winning Over the Skeptics | Prenuvo Founder & CEO Andrew Lacy

When Andrew Lacy launched Prenuvo, most of the medical establishment dismissed it as fringe. Now, some of those same skeptics are collaborating with him on research.

In this episode, we sit down with Andrew Lacy, founder and CEO of Prenuvo, to unpack what it takes to build trust in an unconventional idea. He opens up about how a moment of personal reckoning led him to pivot from tech to health—and why he believes early detection should be a fundamental right.

We cover:
📊 How they’ve built the world’s largest dataset of whole-body MRI imaging, and what they’re doing with that data
✨ What happens when Kim Kardashian shares about your company on social media, unprompted
💡 Going from being dismissed by the medical establishment to forming major research partnerships
🧠 What Prenuvo’s dataset is revealing about early disease markers, brain perfusion, and aging
📈 The economics of prevention vs. treatment—and why large employers are on their minds

Tune in wherever you listen to podcasts!

How you can support my work:
⭐️ Leave a review for the Heart of Healthcare podcast. It takes just five seconds!
💻 Download a copy of my digital health startup database.
🫶 Share this email with a digital health friend.
💸 Become a paid subscriber or sponsor!

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?