MedStack Raises $2.4M Oversubscribed Seed Round To Drive The App Ecosystem For Healthcare

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Feb 26, 2019, 18:03 ET

TORONTO, Feb. 26, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - MedStack, a privacy and security compliance solution for healthcare apps, has raised a $2.4 million oversubscribed seed round led by TELUS Ventures, with participation from ScaleUP Ventures and Panache Ventures. Existing investor Ontario Centres of Excellence and several existing angel investors have also participated in this round. TELUS Ventures and ScaleUP are joining the company's board with this round, as MedStack celebrates over 50 digital health companies actively leveraging its platform.

MedStack's mission is to enable more digital innovation to be adopted in healthcare so that cloud technologies may deliver care anywhere with smarter, more timely decisions and better experiences. The company's first focus is to help app developers meet privacy compliance requirements, by way of automation systems. Those systems standardize data protection elements for HIPAA and Canadian health data privacy legislations across a broach choice of public cloud vendors and technology stacks and generate real-time-auditable security policies and real-time and fully-compliant monitoring.

MedStack founders, CEO Balaji Gopalan and CTO Simon Woodside, have evolved this solution with the input of hundreds of digital health startups through programs including Dreamit Health, the Creative Destruction Lab and 500 Startups. Over 50 companies now run their apps integrated with MedStack's healthcare compliance platform.

"Entrepreneurs bringing apps to healthcare are doing important work in technology, often inspired by their own personal experiences to make health management and care delivery smarter and better", says Balaji Gopalan. "For too long, developers have struggled because of the challenges of onboarding to the industry's stringent requirements and proving compliance over time, while maintaining technological creative freedom. We've solved that."

The TELUS Ventures investment into MedStack represents a strategic synergy between MedStack's growing reputation as an enabler for digital health companies in Canada, the US and elsewhere; and TELUS' strong leadership in both delivering innovative digital health solutions across the healthcare ecosystem, and collaborating with industry partners through the TELUS Health Exchange (THX) platform.

"We are uniquely positioned as a corporate venture capital fund (CVC) to invest in companies like MedStack that are helping to empower health start-ups to succeed and scale," said Rich Osborn, managing partner, TELUS Ventures. "Our investment goes beyond capital as we leverage our breadth of expertise to support companies in their growth trajectory building networks within the health and developer communities and uncovering new opportunities with other emerging businesses. Together with MedStack, we look forward to advancing the use of technology in healthcare and improving health outcomes."

The funds from this raise will be put towards channel development for the recently-launched MedStack Control, a system that brings real-time hands-on infrastructure control and more flexibility for client companies, as well as to expanding the engineering, sales and support teams to enhance and support the platform's capabilities, and towards earning additional third-party security certifications and attestations.

About TELUS Ventures
As the strategic investment arm of TELUS Corporation (TSX: T, NYSE: TU), TELUS Ventures was founded in 2001 and is one of Canada's most active corporate venture capital funds. TELUS Ventures has invested in over 70 companies since inception with a focus on innovative technologies such as Health Tech, IoT, AI and Security. TELUS Ventures is an active investment partner and supports its portfolio companies through mentoring; exposure to TELUS' extensive network of business and co-investment partners; access to TELUS' technologies and broadband networks; and by actively driving new solutions across the TELUS ecosystem. For more information please visit: ventures.telus.com.

About MedStack
Launched in 2015, MedStack is a cloud automation technology company that builds and manages healthcare privacy compliance into cloud hosting tools. This greatly de-risks application commercialization, and the standardized platform can help bring apps to market 60% faster. MedStack now provides enhanced app hosting and actively managed compliance policies in several countries to over 50 healthcare app vendors in various spaces. The company is proudly based in Toronto, Canada.

SOURCE Medstack Co.