Health IT, Startups

Startup offering integration solution raises $4.5M seed round

The Florida startup, Bridge Connector, will use the money to hire developers and boost its support, sales and management teams.

Bridge Connector, a startup that offers an integration platform for healthcare organizations, has secured a seed investment of $4.5 million led by Axioma Ventures and backed by former Publix Super Markets CEO Howard Jenkins. Other investors include Axioma Ventures co-founding partner Alex Jenkins; Baldwin Beach Capital CFO Hannibal Baldwin; and gastroenterologist Dr. Jeffrey Wenger.

“We are excited to back Bridge Connector, which has created an innovative ‘industry-first’ for healthcare organizations to automatically transfer data between disparate systems,” Jenkins said in a news release.

The money will be put to use to hire developers and boost the company’s support, sales and management teams.

In a phone interview, founder and CEO David Wenger elaborated on how much Bridge Connector has already grown. It had six employees at the beginning of January and has since expanded to 25 employees.

Wenger also said he hopes the funding will help his startup grow in terms of partnerships and contracts with other organizations.

The company, which is headquartered in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, also has offices in Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee. It launched in May 2017 and has been active in the market since January of this year. Its integration platform can connect customer relationship management, EMR and other systems to improve data flow.

“Everything we do is automated,” Wenger explained. “We have data flow back and forth between disparate systems.”

But much of the startup’s work is behind the scenes, and users like hospital staff members may not even know what’s powering the data flow. “It makes the rest of the staff’s lives a lot easier,” he added.

Wenger declined to name specific clients, but said Bridge Connector’s customers include behavioral health facilities, hospitals, a 100-location nursing home chain in Michigan and a 40-location skilled nursing facility in New York. It is also a Salesforce partner, meaning it works closely with the organization and its CRM platform.

The Florida company charges clients a monthly subscription cost that includes updates and maintenance. Wenger said the price is typically between $500 to $3,000 per month per integration, depending in part on the amount of data a client has flowing back and forth.

When asked what differentiates Bridge Connector from its competitors, Wenger commented is its solution’s affordability and the fact that it is full service.

Looking ahead, the startup’s goal “is to create a system and a process that helps change the way healthcare operates through interoperability,” Wenger said, adding that the company aims to be the “platform of choice for integration in healthcare.”

Photo: Topp_Yimgrimm, Getty Images

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