Why We Invested in Qi

Why We Invested in Qi Health

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We’re excited to announce our investment in Qi Health, the first social health network built from real-world experiences to help people understand what actually works for their health.

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The front door to healthcare has changed. Most people don't start their health journey with a doctor – they start on Reddit at 2am, scrolling through threads. They're on YouTube watching someone's recovery story. They're reading comment sections on TikTok, looking for the one person who finally figured out what worked.

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More than 80% of adults now get health information from social platforms. Reddit's health communities alone are growing nearly 50% every year. These aren't passive readers – they're people desperately searching for answers, comparing notes, and what actually helped them. 

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This behavior is creating one of the richest and most overlooked datasets in healthcare: millions of real-world patient experiences shared openly and repeatedly. People are posting about what worked, what didn't, what combination of things finally moved the needle. But all of that knowledge is scattered across thousands of unstructured conversations, impossible to verify or make sense of at scale.

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Qi Health is building the platform that transforms those scattered stories into structure, helping people learn what’s actually worked for others like them. The platform brings together patient insights from Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, and online forums alongside clinical research across more than 600 conditions. Using AI, Qi identifies what has worked for specific cohorts, scores each finding by evidence and reliability, and makes the source visible. As people track what they try and share their outcomes, the data grows, the system improves, and the whole community benefits.

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Why It Matters

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Healthcare has traditionally flowed from the top down – evidence and guidelines driven by institutions, providers, and payers deciding what should work. But more and more, health decisions are starting from the bottom up: people experimenting, sharing outcomes, and learning from one another in real time. That shift in how knowledge is created, and who it comes from, is redefining modern healthcare.

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Take something like insomnia, which affects more than 70 million adults in the U.S. every year and is one of the most discussed health topics online. Someone struggling to sleep ends up on Reddit's r/insomnia forum, reading hundreds of comments about magnesium glycinate versus melatonin, cross-referencing Amazon reviews and price points for sleep-tracking wearables, trying to figure out if sleep restriction therapy is worth starting. The answers are buried in there somewhere, but users are left on their own to piece together which approach is right for their specific situation, what's actually backed by evidence, and how many people tried it and saw results.

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By structuring patient feedback and pairing it with clinical evidence, Qi captures the real-world layer of healthcare that's been missing: how people actually behave, adapt, and respond outside of a clinic.

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What Stood Out to Us

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For Edward Chiu, Founder & CEO, Qi’s mission is deeply personal. After severe nerve damage from an antibiotic called ciprofloxacin left him unable to walk properly, specialists left him with no clear answers. He did what millions of desperate patients do – he spent months digging through Reddit threads, patient forums, and clinical studies that eventually led him to a protocol that allowed him to heal. 

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Edward built Qi from a simple insight that when someone discovers what works, that knowledge shouldn't stay buried in scattered comment threads – it should be organized and accessible for the next person searching. He understands both the desperation that drives patients to search and the technical complexity of turning collective experience into reliable intelligence.

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Qi represents the kind of company we’re excited to back at Torch: one that translates growing consumer behavior trends into critical infrastructure, led by a founder who intuitively understands his customer and the ecosystem they navigate.

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Why Now

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The timing couldn’t be better. Today’s consumers are more informed and proactive than ever, turning to peers, online research, and AI to take control of their health. Social platforms are now large enough that “anecdotal” experiences represent meaningful data. And new technology makes it possible to structure that data at scale.

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These shifts create a rare opportunity to redefine how healthcare learns. The internet has already connected people; Qi is connecting their experiences. As engagement compounds, Qi becomes the engine powering a feedback loop that redefines how effectiveness is measured, evidence is built, and care is delivered.

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We’re excited by a future where healthcare begins to look more like a personal health wallet, unifying your data, real-world outcomes, and trusted guidance in one connected system. Qi is building the foundation for that future, transforming how people and the system learn from one another to make every decision smarter.