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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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