Medinas Secures $5M Seed Funding to Expand Sales and Hire Software Talent, Files S-1 for IPO

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) has learned that on October 22, 2019, Medinas, a U.S.-based startup specializing in hospital asset management, announced the completion of a $5 million seed funding round. The round was led by NFX, with participation from Precursor Ventures, Sound Ventures, FJ Labs, and Bryan Frist.

Headquartered in Berkeley, California, Medinas is a market- and technology-driven asset management platform that helps various types of healthcare institutions resell and redeploy their used medical equipment and supplies. In January 2019, Medinas stood out from more than 9,000 global applicants to win $1 million in funding through WeWork’s Creator Awards.

This round of financing will be used to expand sales and hire software development talent. To further enhance hospitals' asset management capabilities, Medinas is developing new software features focused on inventory management, equipment redeployment, and equipment maintenance management.

Due to the high costs and complexities of asset management, hospitals have been slow to adopt technological solutions. Many hospitals in the United States still rely on spreadsheets to manage their medical equipment inventories, often resulting in misplaced devices and millions of dollars in waste. This issue affects over 6,200 hospitals, 9,200 ambulatory surgery centers, 7,000 imaging centers, and 166,000 dental clinics in the U.S. market alone.

Medinas empowers hospitals through three primary approaches: (1) valuing existing capital equipment using the Medinas Price Guide to facilitate better utilization decisions; (2) transforming healthcare IT by equipping hospitals with a cloud-based asset management platform that enables the redeployment and tracking of equipment across other hospitals and clinics within their systems; and (3) reselling, donating, or recycling used equipment, helping them recapture billions of dollars in value. This model also enables smaller hospitals to access pre-owned equipment that was previously unaffordable.

“Medinas Co-founder and CEO Chloe Alpert stated, ‘We are the first company to provide hospitals with modern software to assist in managing their equipment inventory and implementing remarketing programs. NFX has spent decades learning how marketplace networks thrive. Their experience will propel Medinas to success in both domestic and international markets.’”

James Currier, Managing Partner at NFX, stated, “This is a classic marketplace network where thousands of enterprises conduct billions of dollars in transactions offline. Currently, this process is time-consuming, repetitive, error-prone, wasteful, and risky. Medinas Health has solved this problem.”

Charles Hudson, Managing Partner at Precursor Ventures, stated, “Streamlining equipment procurement and remarketing is a top priority for hospital boards. Chief Financial Officers of hospitals recognize that they are wasting billions of dollars in their current processes. Medinas has finally introduced modern software to the healthcare sector, helping to address challenges that many other industries have already navigated.”

NFX is a venture capital firm founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, USA. The company’s investment focus is primarily on early-stage startups and seed rounds. To date, NFX has established 10 portfolio companies across various industries and regions, generating over $10 billion in exits across multiple sectors and geographies.

Precursor Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in October 2015 and headquartered in California, United States. The company focuses on investing in B2B and B2C software applications and hardware. It favors pre-seed investments in startups located in cities such as San Francisco, New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles.

(Compiled by Wang Fang)