The “Hartwick Health” $14.75 million “fundraise” touted by CEO “Daniel Miller” this week seems more dubious by the minute. Yes, the quotation marks are intentional, because none of the claims have checked out. It’s not even clear if there is an operational healthcare reputation management company called Hartwick Health LLC at all.
The claims started to unravel Tuesday morning when two of the three venture capital firms the CEO said had invested in Hartwick Health — Paladin Capital Group and QED Investors — denied any involvement. On Wednesday, the third investor named by Daniel Miller, Revolution Ventures, also said it had never invested in any company named Hartwick Health.
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As MedCity News has already reported, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has no record of any Hartwick Health or Hartwick Health LLC in its EDGAR database. Companies receiving venture capital generally are required to file a Form D statement with the SEC.
The only reference Crunchbase has to any funding for Hartwick Health cites only Monday’s MedCity News story, which we have amended to reflect the questions raised. There is no apparent record anywhere of previous funding rounds, although Miller said Hartwick had raised a total of $28 million in four rounds since the company’s founding in 2012.
Miller told MedCity News that the company would use some of the money to hire 65 new full-time employees. That sounds feasible until you check the Hartwick Health LinkedIn page and see that the company currently has just 1-10 employees. Is that what you would expect from the self-styled “undisputed leader in online reputation management and digital privacy”?
And about that 2012 founding claim, Internet registration database WhoIs.net shows that hartwickhealth.com was registered on Feb. 16, 2016. The one-year registration is due to expire next month.
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The Hartwick Health website and Miller both indicated that the firm was based in Greensboro, North Carolina. The North Carolina Secretary of State’s corporate registry has no record of this company. (Click image to enlarge.)
Lots of other things don’t seem to add up. The Hartwick Health website says that the company has offices in Greensboro, Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as in Atlanta. Yet the only current review on employer rating site Glassdoor makes reference to “weekly meetings [in] downtown Washington, D.C.”
About the only thing that has proven to be accurate is the address Crunchbase has for Hartwick Health, 717 Green Valley Road, Suite 200, in Greensboro.
That address is a Regus shared office space, not what you might expect from a company that had raised millions in VC. However, a call to Regus at that location confirmed that Hartwick does, in fact, have space there.
Reached by phone, Miller said MedCity News’ reporting was “inaccurate.” He did not elaborate. Miller said he would supply contacts at his funding sources at an unspecified time.
Photo: Bigstock
Update: An entity named Hartwick Health was registered on May 23, 2016, in Virgina.
