A digital health tech company with ties to Tampa plans to strengthen those with its latest funding.
Healee, primarily based in Bulgaria with ambitions to make the U.S. its home base, closed a $2 million seed round extension on Tuesday.
It was led by Barcelona-based Nina Capital, with participation from Calm/Storm Ventures, KAYA VC and Eleven Ventures, which previously invested in Healee’s first seed round. The company has raised $4.7 million to date.
Healee’s general manager and overseer of its U.S. presence, Adam Teitelman, is based in Tampa. With the new funding, he hopes to expand the team with a focus on Florida.
The company is also looking to move its Bulgarian headquarters to the U.S., with Tampa as the frontrunner.
“I would say it’s the obvious choice for an HQ,” Teitelman told Tampa Bay Inno. “I’m hiring right now, and I would rather have everyone physically around me.”
The company’s technology enables health care institutions to break into the telehealth world, with infrastructure ranging from digital check-in and scheduling to custom workflows and branding.
Teitelman joined the company in July 2021 after moving to Tampa from Washington, D.C. in late 2020 for his previous medtech company, Rocket Doctor.
“Now that I’ve been here a year and seven months, the growth is nonstop,” he said. “With talent being able to work from anywhere, they’re choosing places with better weather, better economic environments, that are business friendly and community oriented.”
He plans to hire three local employees by the end of the year and “an even larger scale” by 2023, dependent on the company’s growth. The positions will be a mix of sales, marketing and operations.
It will also seek a Series A round in the $10 million to $15 million range. With that closing, the headquarters will officially move stateside.
“The idea is there are tons of health care people here already — Moffitt, Tampa General Hospital and BayCare, to name a few — and it will continue to become a health care-focused city in Florida,” Teitelman said.
He believes his prior healthtech startup experience, coupled with the region’s growing healthtech sector, could make Tampa Bay the next great place for healthtech innovation.
“I want to create a connection point between traditional health care leaders, entrepreneurs and investors in the Tampa Bay area through more formal gatherings and to help with financing,” he said. “My hope with Healee’s growth here is that we could formalize the already robust health care ecosystem in the Tampa Bay region.”
