Jane App has scooped up the Vancouver startup Ginger Desk, adding more clinic administration capabilities in its first public acquisition.
The news: In a LinkedIn post on Tuesday, Ginger Desk founder and CEO, naturopathic doctor Julie Durnan, revealed that her startup was acquired by Vancouver-based healthtech software unicorn Jane Software (known as Jane App) three months ago.
While Jane offers a software platform to run health clinics totally online, Ginger Desk aims to make health clinic administration more effective by offering trained virtual assistants (real people, not bots) who manage a clinic’s workflow of patients and bookings. BetaKit has reached out to Jane App for more details on the acquisition.
From the source: “Jane welcomed all 53 members of the Ginger Desk team, and watching them not only find a home here, but truly thrive has been one of the greatest joys of my career,” Durnan, who is now Jane’s head of services, wrote on LinkedIn.
Following the thread: This appears to be Jane’s first public acquisition of another company, and comes a year after the clinic software provider was set to hit a $1.8-billion CAD valuation, making it a Canadian tech unicorn. According to an April blog post, more than 240,000 practitioners across 40 disciplines use Jane to run their private practices.
As the company has grown over the past few years, Canada’s private healthcare sector has expanded, with total private-sector health expenditures on track to increase by 5.2 percent in 2025. In Ontario, for example, the government has awarded new funds to expand private, for-profit health clinics.
Final thought: Durnan’s founding story at Ginger Desk mirrors that of Jane App’s. Co-founders Alison Taylor and Trevor Johnston launched as a “side hustle” in 2014 to help manage Taylor’s clinic of physiotherapists, chiropractors, and other practitioners. Meanwhile, Durnan, a registered naturopathic doctor, launched Ginger Desk out of her own clinic to help manage administrative work. Both companies also raised very little capital before becoming profitable.
Feature image courtesy Ginger Desk.