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How Stressline works

Stressline tests healthcare startup theses against 241 documented failures across 15 sub-verticals. Each failure is Gioia-coded with a 3-level causal chain. Three adversarial LLMs — prosecution, defense, and judge — evaluate structural risk. The result is a corpus-grounded diagnostic, not a prediction.

How scoring works

Bayesian inference, prior calibration, kill thresholds, and why the score is not a prediction.

15 sub-verticals covered

Failure patterns

The 13 structural failure nodes derived from Gioia coding. Every company maps to exactly one primary node.

13 structural failure patterns

The adversarial engine

Prosecution, defense, and judge — three independent LLM families arguing every thesis from opposing positions.

Corpus methodology

Gioia three-level coding, provenance tagging, inter-rater reliability, and data sources used to build the corpus.

Sub-verticals

Coverage across 15 healthcare B2B sub-verticals. Failure counts, capital destroyed, and top risk patterns per sector.

Limitations

What the engine cannot do, where corpus coverage is thin, and what a stress-test score does not tell you.

Glossary

Plain-English definitions for every term used in Stressline reports: failure nodes, kill thresholds, structural risk.

Data Sources: Rock Health, CB Insights, SBIR Phase I awards, company post-mortems, SEC filings, founder interviews, and press archives. All entries Gioia-coded and provenance-tagged. Full methodology in Corpus methodology.

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