Charlotte health-tech startup HireMe Healthcare is raising funds that its co-founders say will help launch a public platform this summer.
Last week, the startup raised $150,000 of a $500,000 round, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. HireMe Healthcare co-founder Ryan Lee said additional funds have come in since the filing, however, and the total amount is currently $175,000.
The round is a Simple Agreements for Future Equity filing, which is similar to a convertible note in that it "allows for investor-friendly terms for people to come put their capital in," Lee said.
"We're not going to be a pre-revenue company for long," he said. "We've spent the last four years de-risking in ways that other pre-revenue companies have not ... We're looking to raise this $500,000 target amongst people who believe in us at this early stage."
Lee and Trey Ennis started HireMe Healthcare in 2017 to connect health-care professionals to the jobs that best fit their skills and experience.
The platform, which is free and available online or by smartphone app, gives users the opportunity to create a personal profile, reach out directly to hiring managers and search for positions that fit their career goals. Hiring managers are able to search for and communicate with prospective candidates and schedule interviews through the platform.
Ennis said that for the past seven months, the three-person team has been working with software development firm Dualboot Partners to build out the platform. A large portion of the funding round is being used to pay for that service.
"We've been really concentrating on redesigning the user experience for the nurses and health-care professionals so they're more easily able to understand how to use our platform," he said.
The full-service platform is slated for a mid-June launch, Ennis said. As the team prepares, he said they've been working with nursing schools in Charlotte and across the state to build relationships with those graduating this spring.
"They're about to have ample students graduating in May and June, so we're starting to harvest those relationships to build our pipelines of nurses and health-care workers for the community," he said.
Currently, the app has 25 users who Ennis said are all beta testers. When the new product launches, he and Lee expect to onboard close to 5,000 users in the Charlotte region alone.
"We have a list of every licensed nurse in North Carolina that we update quarterly, so we know who we can target," he said.
Lee said the team will also look to hire three new positions this year.
"A lot of it is growing our team as the company hits its projected exponential growth with a fully functioning app," he said. "We want to bring on people to focus on sales cycles and someone to oversee that."
Lee said they'll also begin working on another round of funding sometime this year.
"This [funding] will technically be a seed round," he said. "We do plan to work this toward a Series A, so our early investors can see some tangible equity sooner than later."
