Saint John, N.B-based medtech startup MedReddie is eyeing geographic expansion after raising $782,000 CAD in pre-seed funding.
Of this round, $450,000 was raised last year as part of MedReddie’s winnings from the Elevate Women + Pitch Prize at the Elevate Festival. That investment is made up of funds from angel investors from The Firehood and the Women+ Investor Incubator, as well as Forum Ventures, and BDC Capital via its Thrive Lab initiative.
MedReddie was one of three Canadian startups recently accepted into Google’s North American Women Founders accelerator.
Another participating investor in this raise was the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation. The round also includes government grants, according to a statement from the startup.
MedReddie offers an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform designed to streamline the medical technology evaluation and purchasing process.
The startup says it leverages large-language models (LLMs), including those specialized for the medical domain, to help healthcare providers quickly identify new solutions and facilitate faster procurement decisions.
Length of procurement processes in Canada’s healthcare sector has long been a significant impediment to the development and adoption of health technologies. In a 2016 survey across Council of Academic Hospitals of Ontario members (Ontario’s 23 academic research hospitals), 76 percent of respondents reported procurement was among the biggest hurdles to adopting innovation.
MedReddie was founded in 2020 by CEO Kara LeBlanc after she spent more than decade working on multi-million dollar healthcare contracts in both Canada and abroad. LeBlanc observed that the traditional procurement process posed significant challenges. She noticed that identifying medical suppliers, developing due diligence requirements, and evaluating new technology criteria often consumed substantial time and resources from healthcare providers.
“I founded MedReddie because I knew there was a better way to help healthcare organizations acquire the technologies and services they need while also supporting medtech suppliers with new marketing channels,” LeBlanc said in a statement. “We’ve built a platform that simplifies the process, saves considerable time and resources, and ultimately allows healthcare professionals to focus on what matters most: patient care.”
In addition to its accolade at Elevate Festival last year, MedReddie was one of three Canadian startups to join Google’s North American Women Founders accelerator program in March.
MedReddie plans to use the funding to expand in Canada, target the hospital system in the United States, and explore opportunities in international healthcare markets. The funding will also be used for new hires and to accelerate product development, particularly as it relates to the platform’s AI-powered features.
“Access to care is a growing challenge in Canada,” Sevrine Labelle, managing director of BDC’s Thrive Lab, said in a statement. “MedReddie is reinventing outdated processes to enhance value-based healthcare procurement that is proven to reduce costs, wait times, readmission rates and create greater capacity. We are thrilled to be one of their first investors to help them scale and continue to drive their important social impact.”
Feature image courtesy of MedReddie.