Healthcare Technology Featured Article

August 13, 2015

Wheelings & Dealings: Venture Capital Financing Nets PHEMI $12.2 Million


PHEMI is a Big Data warehouse company that aims to enable organizations to easily access and mine any type of data, at any volume, to drive insights that lower costs, improve outcomes and allow users to make better decisions, faster. Essentially, it is a data mining company that has focused on the medical sector.

The company was founded by entrepreneurs Paul Terry, Adam Lorant and John Seminerio, along with St. Paul’s Hospital cardiologists Chris Thompson and Alan Rabinowitz. In March 2014, PHEMI completed a seed round which netted the startup $2.8 million.

Almost a year and a half later, investors such as CTI Life Sciences Fund, British Columbia Discovery Fund (Discovery Capital), BDC Capital Healthcare Venture Fund and Yaletown Venture Partners, saw enough potential that earlier this week a Series A funding round ended with a 400 percent improvement over the seed round.

The original goal of the company was to make the collection of health data easier for population health management and clinical studies information gathering. According to Dr. Paul Terry, the company’s CEO, “What we’re offering now, essentially, is the ability to turn virtually any piece of patient information, physician letters, lab results, imaging, medication, previous treatment plans, into searchable information, thereby unlocking vast amounts of new data.”

The 400 percent comes out to a successful Series A funding of $12.2 million. This will go a long way toward PHEMI’s goal of focusing its attention to include data-driven communities, such as the public sector, insurance and the financial community.

As more companies begin to take advantage of big data, having a company like PHEMI that protects privacy and ensures legitimate use of data to drive continuous improvement while helping organizations meet compliance and governance requirements becomes essential and particularly vital to the health industry.

Dr. Terry said, “Enterprises of all sizes are recognizing the enormous opportunity for discovery and innovation buried in their data. Data growth is massive, smart devices, the digitization of healthcare, genomics and other omics data, and dataflow from various sources such as email and the Internet businesses must be able to take advantage of big data to remain competitive. Organizations that can move quickly to unlock their data silos, transform them into digital assets and share this information, while protecting privacy and security, will win. With this additional capital, PHEMI will expand our sales, marketing and engineering efforts to ensure our partners and customers can use all of their data to create value and innovate.”

PHEMI’s goal is to help enterprises focus on collecting and storing data to use it strategically, and derive insight to drive operational efficiencies. It is not surprising that big data healthcare startups are seeing increasing investment. Companies are finding that they need to be more data-driven, and being able to take advantage of what PHEMI has to offer will help them unlock and share data without compromising privacy.




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
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