Dr. John Shufeldt, an Arizona serial entrepreneur and emergency room physician, has started another venture — this time to raise money for promising local health startups.
Shufeldt formed an investment group dubbed Xcellerant 1 TLC LLC to raise money for Tesis Labs, a Phoenix-based provider of genetic testing and precision medicine. This is the first external financing for Tesis Labs since it launched in early 2020. Before that, the company had raised about $15 million.
Shufeldt said he started his VC group about six weeks ago to raise money specifically for Tesis Labs.
Now he plans to raise another round of venture capital for series A and seed funding for other health care related ventures.
"For a long time, I've been wanting to help entrepreneurs," said Shufeldt, who just wrote a book, "Entrepreneur Rx: The Physician's Guide to Starting a Business," which is available on Amazon and other sites.
His venture capital fund is the next phase of looking for ways to help improve the delivery of health care.
Shufeldt has founded and co-founded 15 companies, including Pinnacle Emergency Medicine in the early 1990s, NextCare Urgent Care in 1993, MeMD in 2010, which he sold to Walmart earlier this year. He also won the Phoenix Business Journal Health Care Heroes Innovator Award in 2020.
Meanwhile, this new round of funding for Tesis will help the Phoenix company increase production capability and clinical support as well as to move ahead with several clinical initiatives for its products as they move through the clinical validation process.
"There will be a time when we get our genome analyzed at a very young age so we can be on the lookout for any genetic conditions that may affect us as we age," Shufeldt said. "That whole science will continue to develop at a very rapid rate in the decades to come."
