A St. Petersburg-based telehealth startup has raised more than $1.9 million after increasing business by roughly 10 times over the last year.
RxLive, which provides access to pharmacists via its telehealth platform, closed the round late last year and recently filed the funding with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It was a culmination of $1.4 million in debt funding turned into a convertible note, with some new equity funding added. St. Petersburg-based Seedfunders, an investment firm focused on early-stage companies, led the round.
"We’re growing significantly; we’re expanding our team, investing in technology, and really focused on commercialization," RxLive co-founder Mark Engelen said.
The company currently employs seven full-time employees with many contractors, and Engelen hopes to hit 100 total employees by the end of the year, with roughly 10 of those being non-contractors. The company spans 28 states.
"During Covid, we used that as an opportunity to really invest, to build the software to deploy," Engelen said. "So now we have a really robust platform, as well as machine learning and other meaningful analytics to deploy."
Those analytics help with patient selection for the proper pharmacist, patient monitoring and intervention.
He said the company is set for funding through the rest of the year and is undergoing an insider investment round. Engelen added the company would most likely open a seed round in Q1 of 2022 with a goal of $3 million to $5 million.
Medtech and telehealth industries have been among the biggest winners during the coronavirus pandemic, with many clients forced to adopt technology when in-person appointments were no longer options. While Engelen believes some appointments will be pivoting back to in-person, others, he said, cannot go back to the way things were.
"I think there's a difference of the role in the physician and engagement of the physician, and people will go see their doctor in person," he said. "But for behavioral health, pharmacy or nutrition, I think the convenience of being able to talk to the clinician over telehealth is the genie in the bottle" and can't go back to how it was.
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