PHEMI, a Vancouver-based big data warehouse that allows organizations to access and mine any variety of data to drive insights, announced today that it has raised a $12.2 million Series A round of venture financing, co-led by CTI Life Sciences Fund (CTI) and British Columbia Discovery Fund (Discovery Capital). The funding round included both new and follow-on investors, such as BDC Capital Healthcare Venture Fund and Yaletown Venture Partners. The announcement follows PHEMI’s $2.8 million seed round in March of last year.
PHEMI was founded by serial entrepreneurs Paul Terry, Adam Lorant and John Seminerio, who had combined expertise in developing and commercializing business and technology solutions. They joined St. Paul’s Hospital cardiologists Chris Thompson and Alan Rabinowitz to start PHEMI, which was initially focused on the healthcare and life sciences sectors.
PHEMI will expand its focus to include data-driven communities, including public sector, insurance, and financial industries. “Enterprises of all sizes are recognizing the enormous opportunity for discovery and innovation buried in their data,” said Paul Terry, president and CEO of PHEMI. “Data growth is massive—smart devices, the digitization of healthcare, genomics and other omics data, and data flow from various sources such as email and the Internet—businesses must be able to take advantage of big data to remain competitive.”
As more companies try to embrace big data, PHEMI unlocks and shares data while ensuring privacy for its users. PHEMI’s goal is to help enterprises focus on collecting and storing data to use it strategically, and derive insight to drive operational efficiencies.
“The big data market represents a tremendous growth opportunity for PHEMI in a variety of industries,” said Charles Cook, CMA for Discovery Capital. “PHEMI shares our vision for serving this segment of the market with a turnkey solution that helps organizations address the dual challenges of gathering data for insights while ensuring data privacy and security.”