Clinia secures Series A funding, partnership with Telus Health to deploy its search tech
Summary
Montr\xe9al-based Clinia has entered into a strategic partnership with Telus health technology services division and closed a $10-million CAD Series A round led by the Canadian telecommunications giants venture capital (VC) arm.For Clinia, which has spent the past few years ensuring its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered health-search infrastructure is enterprise-grade, the deal gives the healthtech startup fresh capital from Telus Ventures, a new customer in Telus Health, and a strong distribution network.In an interview with BetaKit, Clinia co-founder and CEO Simon B\xe9dard said that Telus approval grants the companys tech the endorsement it needs to gain the trust of other large healthcare organizations in the United States (US)and a better avenue for selling to them.This is our visa to say, Hey world, the largest player in telehealth in Canada has our technology, its stamped, its approved, said B\xe9dard. From a growth perspective, for Clinia, on top of capital, its really an infinite opportunity here, he told BetaKit in an interview.Clinias all-equity, all-primary $10-million Series A financing closed in mid-December. The startup has also secured $4.4 million in grants to date.Telus Ventures managing partner Terry Doyle told BetaKit in an interview that Clinia has been building a great business. He credited the startup for building a product capable of both meeting Telus Healths requirements and growing beyond them, noting that Telus is a fairly demanding customer.For us, it was a clear match, and clear that they had built a robust technology that could deliver the types of results that we need, said Doyle.Clinia was founded in 2016 as a direct-to-consumer play, aiming to become the Expedia of healthcare for Canada before it stumbled onto the problem of how to manage a health resource registry at scale and pivoted into its current business-to-business approach.Since then, Clinia has built its health-focused, AI-powered, API-first search infrastructure for enterprise healthcare organizations from the ground up. At the time, Telus was still trying to figure out whether they wanted to build and own this tech internally or partner with a third-party provider.Sometimes we build stuff ourselves and we deploy it into the marketplace, but sometimes we want to go faster, said B\xe9langer.According to B\xe9dard, it took Clinia a few years to prove to Telus Health that they were the right folks for this job and that Clinias tech had a much wider array of potential use cases.