St. John’s-based SiftMed announced today that it has secured another $5 million CAD in seed funding to expand the reach of its AI-powered medical claim document review software.
“Our mission is to uncover facts that change lives.”
Holly Hill, SiftMed
In 2010, the American Medical Association said that one in five medical claims is mishandled by health insurers. According to SiftMed co-founder and CEO Holly Hill, difficulty surfacing the right supporting evidence while sifting through a sea of supporting files can play a key role.
Enter SiftMed, which ingests, structures, and uses AI to analyze thousands of pages worth of documents in a fraction of the time it would take human reviewers.
In an exclusive interview with BetaKit, Hill said it can take a series of humans hours to days to review all the records related to these medical claims. The CEO claimed SiftMed can help them reach decisions in two hours or less, depending on the type of review.
That speed is a key part of the company’s value proposition. So is ensuring nothing important is missed. “Our mission is to uncover facts that change lives,” Hill said.
SiftMed’s latest all-equity, all-primary capital round closed last month and was led by Toronto’s Staircase Ventures with support from fellow new investor, Calgary-based The51. Existing backers, including St. John’s-based Pelorus VC, Halifax’s Sandpiper Ventures, and the founders of Atlantic Canadian startup success story Verafin, also participated.
SiftMed’s 30-person team also includes former staff from Verafin, a St. John’s fraud detection and anti-money laundering software company that sold to Nasdaq for $2.75 billion USD ($3.86 billion CAD) in 2020.
Hill did not share SiftMed’s valuation, but claimed the round came at a significantly higher valuation than its two prior seed financings: $2.7 million CAD in both 2023 and 2025. Today’s announcement brings the startup’s total funding to nearly $11 million, and Hill expects SiftMed to pursue a larger Series A within the next 12 to 18 months.
Patients and policymakers have raised concerns over possible harms of AI-powered medical claim review, from the opacity of some tools making the decisions to the lack of accountability and oversight, as insurers increasingly leverage the tech to expedite the process.
“A major worry is that wrongful denials may be occurring as a result of a lack of meaningful human review of recommendations made by AI,” Stanford Law School health policy professor Michelle Mello and her colleagues wrote in a recent Health Affairs article.
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Hill said the inspiration for SiftMed came from helping a young California man actually challenge the initial assumptions about his medical claim.
That occurred while co-founder Dr. Jeremie Larouche, a practising orthopaedic trauma and spine surgeon and independent medical examiner, was working with a man who was left paralyzed following a motorcycle accident. The initial assumption was that this man suffered a spinal cord injury from the crash, but he could remember being able to move his legs when he was admitted to the hospital.
After days of sifting through documents, 13,151 pages in, Larouche found evidence in the form of a tiny, handwritten nurse’s note indicating that the man’s paralysis occurred after the hospital forgot to put him in a back brace, not the accident itself. Believing there was a better way to come to the same conclusion, Larouche teamed up with Hill to launch SiftMed in 2020.
Toronto-based Wisedocs is tackling the same problem. Staircase founder and managing partner Janet Bannister told BetaKit over email that SiftMed is more than doubling its revenue every six months, which she attributed in part to its products’ high degree of accuracy—something Hill sees as a differentiator, alongside the calibre of its team.
Bannister sees potential for SiftMed to become “part of every medical claim in North America.”
“[SiftMed] has a huge vision and the team to execute,” Bannister said. “They are tackling the $26-billion medical claims review process with an AI-based solution that is superior to anything on the market and has strong network effects.”
Feature image courtesy SiftMed.