Melbourne healthtech startup HealthKit, which has created a practice management system for private practices, a practitioner directory, and a health management platform for patients, has raised $1.6 million in a Series A round led by a Melbourne-based family office investor, with participation from existing investors.
The funding will go towards building out the team, product enhancements, and expanding the platform into Asia, Europe, and North America. This is the first substantial round of funding for the startup, which raised a small amount of angel funding in its early days.
Launched in 2012 by Lachlan Wheeler and Alison Hardacre, HealthKit now has over 11,000 practitioners around the world using its practice management software, while its directory boasts more than 220,000 practitioner profiles. The startup stated that 90 percent of its practitioner base is located in Australia, with the rest spread across more than 40 countries.
The global expansion was planned from the get go, with Wheeler and Hardacre originally working on a health platform for the Australian system before realising that the same problems were facing healthcare systems globally, and starting over on HealthKit. Wheeler said the fresh funding will now help the startup accelerate its push overseas.
“The funding will allow us to grow the team five-fold. We will also add product features, functions and integrations along with mobile platform capability to benefit practitioners and patients,” he said.
Cofounder Alison Hardacre added that the startup found an investor who will “really help us achieve our growth and who is committed to our vision of making health better.”
“We are building a global network of practitioners and patients, and all while growing a pool of anonymised data that can be used to better understand global health trends. So far we have achieved 1 percent of what we want to achieve,” she said.
This data aspect of the platform is particularly interesting; HealthKit collects health data through its booking system and the exercise and food diaries made available to patients.
Hardacre previously told Startup Daily that the startup is looking at various ways to put this data to work to help better understand health.
“We built HealthKit as a data analytics hub right from inception. We knew that the anonymised health data would have benefits for governments, to show where there may be a shortage of practitioners or disease clusters; medical researchers, to analyse patient populations and health data metrics; and corporate partners, such as pharmaceutical companies for clinical trial participant recruitment,” she said.
It’s set to be a big year for the Australian healthtech space, with health insurance company HCF last month announcing the startups taking part in its HCF Catalyst accelerator and scale up program with Slingshot. Companies taking part include CareMonkey, My Health Test, and Curo.
Image: Lahclan Wheeler and Alison Hardacre. Source: Supplied
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