Fruit Street Telehealth Raises $3M and Expands Oversubscribed Series A to $4M of Equity Financing
NEW YORK, Nov. 30, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Fruit Street Telehealth (Fruit Street) today announced that it has raised $3M of Series A financing, bringing its total number of physician investors to more than 160. Laurence Girard, CEO and Founder of Fruit Street Telehealth, stated that, "The round is currently oversubscribed beyond $3M because physicians believe in our product and our vision. We have thus decided to expand our Series A to $4M of capital raised. We already have $750K of commitments from new and current physician investors to participate in this round." Girard went on to state, "The more physicians we have participating in our medical think tank, promoting the product with their colleagues, and investing in Fruit Street, the stronger our company will become."
Fruit Street was founded in May of 2014 and provides telehealth software to healthcare providers. Fruit Street software allows physicians to monitor the health, diet, and lifestyle of their patients through HIPAA compliant video consultations, wearable devices and mobile applications.
Fruit Street is a public benefit corporation, a specific type of corporation which allows social impact to be a charter purpose in addition to the traditional corporate call of maximizing profit for shareholders. The public benefit purpose and social mission of the company is to "Prevent and treat lifestyle related disease using telehealth, wearable devices, and mobile applications."
Fruit Street CEO Laurence Girard was recently featured in an article appearing in the Huffington Post, titled, "7 Reasons a Healthcare Software Startup Should Be Funded by Physicians, Not VCs" in which he spoke about this physician funding strategy. In that article, Girard explained that "At Fruit Street, we would prefer to raise $25 million of funding if needed from 500 physicians investing $50,000 each while benefiting from their advice, rather than having only a few venture capitalists as investors that gave us the same amount of investment."
Fruit Street has conducted one of the most successful physician crowdfunding campaigns in history. The company was founded in May of 2014 and has raised an average of $220,000 per month from physician investors via its LinkedIn campaigns since its inception.
This additional $4M of funding will be used to continue developing the product with its joint venture partner VSee. Earlier this year Fruit Street announced a strategic partnership with VSee which received much acclaim in the telehealth industry. VSee is the video engine found within Fruit Street and is the same video technology that NASA selected for use on the International Space Station for astronaut telemedicine.
Additionally, the funding will increase Fruit Street's digital advertising budget for sales and marketing initiatives, product development, and to fund telehealth clinical trials with the Fruit Street product to prove clinical and cost effectiveness of this model of healthcare delivery.
Raising its $4M Series A will bring Fruit Street's total funding to date to $7.4M which includes a previous $1.8M equity round and $1.6M round of long term debt from existing physician investors.
Fruit Street now has an international footprint with customers and investors in the United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Ireland, Mexico, and England.
About Fruit Street Telehealth
Fruit Street Telehealth is a public benefit company, licensing telehealth software to healthcare professionals allowing them to conduct HIPAA-compliant video consultations with their patients to monitor health, diet and lifestyle using medical/wearable devices and mobile applications. Fruit Street was co-founded by Laurence Girard and Dr. Milton Chen, PhD. Since its launch in 2014, Fruit Street has been recognized as one of the most innovative and transformational telehealth software products on the market. For more information, visit www.fruitstreet.com. For more information about Fruit Street, email [email protected] or call 347-943-6654.
SOURCE Fruit Street Telehealth
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