SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
MedStack Grows 300% TTM, Raises $3.2m Seed at $15m Valuation
21 Dec 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're just shy of 2 million ARR, so it's probably a little bit less than that, but we'll be hitting 2 million ARR by the end of the year.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey, folks. My guest today is Simon Woodside.
He's the co-founder of MedStack, which is a helping secure platform for digital health. He's got a CS degree at the University of Waterloo and is part of the Apple Core Operating System Group engineering program manager. Before that, Simon, you ready to take us to the top? I am. Thank you, Nathan. All right. So tell us what MedStack is.
Are these hospitals that are paying you for HIPAA-compliant solutions, or where are you playing?
We definitely are dealing with hospitals and insurance companies, but they are at one removed from us. So we, our direct customers are digital health app makers, and then they in turn are selling to hospitals and insurance companies.
So give me an example of a customer. Can you name one or two?
Sure. Give you a couple. So one is a really cool company called Keratin and they're in neonatal intensive care units and they are operating a system that manages bottles of mother's milk. which is critical of these are being, they have to be always go to the right person at the right time without too much delay. So that's a pretty mission critical system with a lot of availability requirements.
And another really awesome customer is called Inkblot. They are doing digital health or sorry. Well, yeah, they're doing digital health therapy. So it's like remote telemedicine, you know, one-on-one with real people, psychological therapy, psychotherapy, And they're pretty big. They were just bought by an insurance company, Green Shield. So yeah.
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Chapter 2: What is MedStack and how does it operate in the digital health space?
180 grand a month right now in revenue?
That's about right. Yeah. We're just shy of 2 million ARR. So it's probably a little bit less than that, but we'll be hitting 2 million ARR by the end of the year.
I love stories like this. I don't know if you remember, our first interview was back in the middle of 2018. Do you remember that?
Well, so yeah, so you interviewed my CEO, business partner, co-founder, Bology, I think twice now, right?
Yes. Oh, okay. That was him, not you. Got it.
It was him. Yeah. So I'm the CTO. Very cool. So I did get some of the numbers and make sure I had them right, but I'm more expert in other parts of the business.
Well, I should have begged you to write a check back in 2018 because Balaji shared back then, you guys were doing about $30,000 a month in revenue. You're now five times as big here four years later. So this is an exciting story. Now, Simon, have you been able to do this funded by customer growth after your 2.4 million seed round in 2019? Or did you raise more?
We've raved more. Yeah. So we actually just completed a raise of 3.1 million. And so that was led by Blue Ventures and Telus, one of our previous investors as well. But yeah, I mean, we're making good money as well.
So, I mean, you know, theoretically we might've been able to go revenue positive, but you know, we want to grow, like we see a huge, huge, huge opportunity, like, you know, say a billion dollar opportunity. It's bigger than that. And so we want to continue to grow quickly. And that meant... And we have some great... And some of our investors are great partners as well.
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Chapter 3: Who are MedStack's primary customers and what do they pay for the service?
We have good board members who are really helping us out, connecting us with partners, that kind of thing. It gives us a lot of credibility as well. We're in a trust business. What we're doing is enabling our customers to be trusted by their customers.
So all those hospitals, clinics, insurance companies need to be able to trust them to curate or to handle their protected health information with due diligence, with security, with privacy. And so for us, trust is paramount. And so having these kinds of backers, it's a big value for us.
Understood. What's the team look like today? How many folks full time?
Oh, we're 15 now. 15. We've been growing rapidly since we raised.
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Check it out today at founderpath.com forward slash products. That's plural forward slash valuations. Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. Where do you intend to invest most of that money? Or is it just a signal you want to send to the market and say, look, you can trust us. We've raised all this money. We're not going to shut down tomorrow.
It's all going into people. What kind of, you know, it's staff. So like, you know, we're, we're, we've just like doubled or more than double, you know, we're just doubling our, our engineering team.
Um, how many are total engineers today?
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Chapter 4: What recent funding has MedStack secured and how will it be used?
It's classic. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Toby Latke with Shopify. He's amazing.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business?
I mean, I'm just checking out Almanac right now. We're just trying it out, but it's pretty cool.
Almanac. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Around nine hours of sleep.
Okay. And what's your situation, Simon? Married, single, kids? I'm single. Okay. No kiddos. How old are you?
44.
44. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
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