Catalyze Secures $6.5M Series B Funding to Accelerate Secure Healthcare Data Cloud Transformation
The healthcare industry is increasingly prioritizing treatment efficacy, driving the rapid adoption of more efficient and precise medical IT technologies in recent years. With the widespread use of electronic health records (EHRs), connected medical devices, wearable technology, and genetic testing, a growing volume of personal health information is being stored in the cloud. Any leakage of this data would constitute a severe violation of individual privacy. Surveys indicate that the average cost of information security management per patient due to data breaches in the healthcare sector reaches $233, significantly higher than the $78 in the retail industry, making healthcare the industry with the highest data breach costs across all sectors. Data confidentiality and security have become major concerns for both patients and healthcare professionals.
Recently, Catalyze, a medical information security platform company, raised $6.5 million in its Series B financing round. The round was led by Lewis & Clark Ventures, based in St. Louis, with participation from Arthur Ventures, Baird Venture Partners, and Chicago Venture.
Based in Madison, Wisconsin, and founded in April 2013, Catalyze has developed a cloud platform that is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The company stated that it would use the financing proceeds to upgrade its HIPAA-compliant platform, which is certified by the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST), to ensure the secure transmission of health information data, accelerate the development of its core business—healthcare data integration—and expand its cloud-hosted products and services.
Catalyze offers two products certified under the HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF): one is Stratum, an information hosting solution for backup and system recovery; the other is Redpoint, a solution described by Catalyze as an “information integration sherpa.”
Catalyze’s Two Flagship Products: Stratum and Redpoint
Key Features and Functions of Stratum: Designed a software-defined secure network for Docker, addressing a major gap in multi-tenant cloud products with HITRUST CSF certification; handles encryption of data in transit and at rest while ensuring HIPAA compliance; guarantees compliant login under HIPAA requirements; provides remote vulnerability scanning with enterprise-grade security levels; features an intrusion detection system designed by a team of senior security engineers; automatically backs up system data for 30 days and offers enterprise-level security for system recovery.
Key Features and Functions of Redpoint: Guides users throughout the entire process of medical data integration; automatically establishes secure VPN connections; provides intelligent workflow options for various medical application scenarios, and more.
Catalyze’s team members come from diverse professional backgrounds. Prior to joining Catalyze, employees worked at organizations such as Rackspace Cloud Computing, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Epic Systems (a provider of electronic health record software), NASA, and Equifax. Their experience spans industries including meteorology, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals, providing Catalyze with a cross-industry perspective.
Travis Good, the company’s founder, CEO, and Chief Privacy Officer, had a technology-focused career before founding Catalyze, during which he oversaw cybersecurity systems for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Booz Allen Hamilton. He later transitioned to the medical field, earning his M.D. in 2011. He is also a prolific writer, having contributed articles to the tech news site VentureBeat and the healthcare IT media outlet HITconsultant, with his most frequent contributions appearing in the mobile health technology media platform HIStalk Mobile.
Relaxed Work Atmosphere of the Team
Mohan Balachandran, another co-founder and the company’s Chairman, has an engineering background and previously worked in supply chain management and master data management at a Fortune 100 company in the United States. He later enrolled in medical programs offered by U.S. oncology companies and Net.Orange. Upon recognizing the growth potential of the mobile economy, he ventured into the field of multi-platform development technologies.
Catalyze Co-founders Travis Good (left) and Mohan Balachandra (right)
Other team members include Rajashekar Sundaramurthy, former Chief Product Officer at Equifax; Mark Olschesky, Chief Data Officer with experience in clinical application management; Adam Leko, CTO and Chief Security Officer with a professional background in high-performance computing and cybersecurity; and Casey Bryson, Chief Strategy Officer.
Since its inception in 2013, Catalyze has raised a total of over $12.5 million across four funding rounds: a $20,000 seed round in May 2013; a $2.03 million Series A round in November 2013; a $4 million Series B round in April 2015; and the current $6.5 million Series B round.
In May 2013, Mohan Balachandran and Travis Good, two friends who shared a belief in the “cloud transformation” of healthcare data, joined forces to found Catalyze. That August, Catalyze launched its first product—a mobile backend-as-a-service (mBaaS) for healthcare—accelerating the progress of healthcare connectivity for various institutions and enterprises within the medical system. In the spring of 2014, Catalyze secured two major clients: Blue Shield of California and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. What truly enabled the company to deliver healthcare cloud services with a high level of security was its first HIPAA-compliant platform, introduced in 2014. In October of that year, Catalyze rolled out its first cloud-based data integration service. To this day, this service has become highly popular, handling eight million medical document transactions per month.
Not only that,In terms of strategic layout, Catalyze also collaborates with leading tech cloud platforms to rapidly gain competitive advantages in customer acquisition and technology.This July, Catalyze partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable AWS’s managed healthcare customers to utilize HITRUST-certified cloud services. “The healthcare industry is undergoing a cloud transformation, and AWS is strategically positioning itself in this area to meet the IT needs of healthcare companies,” said Josh Hofmann, Global Head of Amazon AWS.
As early as February of this year, Catalyze announced that it would be available on Microsoft’s cloud technology platform, Microsoft Azure, enabling Azure users to access Catalyze’s specialized, HIPAA-compliant medical cloud data services. “Microsoft Azure is one of the most powerful cloud providers currently available, and its importance will only continue to grow. We are thrilled to partner with Azure to offer features that are HIPAA-compliant and certified by the Healthcare Information Trust Alliance,” said Mohan Balachandran, Co-founder and Chairman of Catalyze. “Even for the organizations or enterprises with the most complex operations in the pharmaceutical industry, our product developed in collaboration with Azure remains an excellent choice.”
Other companies partnering with Catalyze include Rackspace, one of the world’s top three cloud computing centers, and SoftLayer, IBM’s network infrastructure services company. Through Catalyze’s integration with major branded cloud platforms, healthcare industry users can easily transmit HIPAA-compliant documents. Its security level is the highest within healthcare industry standards, ensuring data safety and reliability. By removing this significant technical barrier, healthcare professionals are able to devote more energy to their core responsibilities.
“Today’s medical data transmission faces a series of challenges in terms of information security, which is something the traditional healthcare industry did not anticipate,” said CEO Travis Good in a statement.
“What we value most is leveraging cutting-edge technology to drive the transformation and upgrading of the healthcare industry.” Brian Hopcraft, Managing Director at Lewis & Clark Ventures, the lead investor in this financing round, and an incoming board member of Catalyze, also expressed strong optimism about the potential of these technologies.
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