If you want something built the way you want it, sometimes you have to build it yourself.
Eunice Wu worked as a pharmacist for six years across many of the major Canadian retail chains you probably know, and every single one of them had the same problem: the software they used was simply not built for pharmacists.
“I noticed a lot of the pharmacy innovators didn’t really have pharmacy experience, and the tools that were being created for pharmacy were not [purpose-built],” Wu told BetaKit in an interview. “The most common form-filling tool is actually built for physicians, and the pharmacy companies adopted it because they didn’t have any other choice.”
The new seed round allows Asepha to expand its “breadth,” Wu said.
There’s a misconception that pharmacists simply follow doctors’ directions, Wu explained, but pharmacists actually have a duty to make sure a medication is right for a patient, and that can be slowed down by administrative work.
“Because there’s so much manual documentation, we probably waste 90 percent of our time on administrative work and that’s preventing us from doing more of those clinical services,” Wu said. “That’s why there’s such a long wait time.”
Armed with pharmacy experiences and software grievances, Wu teamed up with former AMD software engineer Can “John” Uncu in 2023 to create Asepha, an agentic AI platform the company claims automates some of a pharmacy’s administrative workflows so pharmacists can focus on the clinical side.
Asepha’s agents help pharmacists by offering real-time web research tools and by screening phone calls to summarize callers’ needs. Its biggest selling point is its AI agent that harnesses optical character recognition (OCR) to interpret and process handwritten prescriptions to reduce the manual data entry almost completely. That means, yes, Asepha can read doctors’ handwriting, Wu claimed.
“Most enterprises are actually surprised about that,” Wu said with a laugh.
She said that Asepha has its own AI models, which required “very, very high spending” with an undisclosed partner to achieve, but they wanted to develop an AI specifically for pharmacy use cases that was safe for pharmacists and patients.
“It’s actually one of the strong points for our selling processes, because some of these enterprises have adopted AI tools in the past and it didn’t work out,” Wu said, explaining that Asepha has built safeguards to keep pharmacists in the loop rather than complacently approving whatever the AI provides.
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The Toronto-based company, which Wu said has already secured multiple undisclosed major Fortune 50 enterprises as customers, is looking to expand its team and open an office in the United States (US) with proceeds from a $4-million USD ($5.47-million CAD) seed round that closed last month. The all-equity round was led by two American firms: Glasswing Ventures, which is gaining a board seat, and Core Innovation Capital. There was participation from RedBud, MGV, and Canadian players Panache, Ripple Ventures, and Front Row Ventures.
Asepha got to this point with only $200,000 USD in pre-seed funding. This new round allows the company to expand its “breadth,” Wu said, by doubling its employee count and opening a New York City office. The company already had a very good understanding of the Canadian market, Wu claimed, so it needed a convenient US location to conduct in-person meetings with potential customers. New York City fit the bill.
“There’s a lot of potential here that we’re not reaching,” Wu said. “We have customers [in the US] already, but there are some areas that we want to expand to [and] we need a better understanding, in terms of proximity.”
Feature image courtesy Asepha.