The healthcare industry is in the middle of a number of crises, not the least of which is the modernization of its internal infrastructure. Having worked in the industry myself, I can attest that the amount of faxing, carbon copies, and redundancy are mind blowing, especially at overworked, underfunded hospitals.
We’ve seen a lot of health startups over the last two years, though naturally many of the ones we’ve covered are more user-facing, like Disrupt finalist Cake Health. But the backend is just as important, and a new $50M fund has just been established by MergerTech specifically for investment in that sector.
MergerTech Capital, as it is called, focuses on “IT infrastructure associated with healthcare, including cloud services, data security, consumer Internet, mobile applications, and managed IT.” Sounds like that includes some of the mobile and web apps we’ve seen connecting users to their healthcare data, but it’s also about establishing the services that provide that data and presumably the people and hardware that will make them possible.
The fund will be led by new General Partner Maneesh Goyal, formerly of Miramar Ventures. There he led the fund’s healthcare IT investments for 5 years will lead the fund to startups helping doctors and hospitals provide more efficient care. MergerTech Advisors senior executives Nitin Khanna and Karan Khanna will also be managing the fund. The two sold their government agency management software system Saber to IT portfolio EDS for $420 million in May 2007 before moving to MergerTech.
The full press release is here. Goyal confirmed that no initial investments have been announced, and as their charter covers quite a bit of ground, any guesses would be fairly wild speculation. There’s plenty of room for failure, and many startups are deluding themselves assuming they don’t have to develop a business model. MergerTech Capital will need to be discerning in where it spreads its $50 million. But with more capital than ever in the space, now’s the time for developers to take risks and try to build something that saves people’s lives.
Thanks to Aldo for the tip.
[Josh Constine contributed to this story]
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