Toronto-based Figure 1, which is often referred to as “Instagram for Doctors”, has raised $5 million from Union Square Ventures as well as existing backers Version One Ventures, Rho Canada Ventures and Graph Ventures. Also participating in the round were Allen & Co. as well as several individual investors.
Figure 1 is now used by more than half a million medical professionals across 100 countries. It plans to use the funds to launch in Brazil, and add Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese to the list of supported languages. Moreover, the fresh capital will go towards expanding support for the small team in Asia to establish potential partnerships.
However, it’s worth adding that Figure 1 doesn’t have immediate plans to monetize its platform.
“We get requests almost daily for various monetization strategies and we started having these conversations, but we’re not pulling the trigger yet,” the company’s CEO Gregory Levey said in a recent interview with Canadian Business. “The focus right now is to build a large, engaged network, and these are extremely valuable eyeballs and users. But we want to treat them with respect, and make the user experience the most important thing, but we know from the emails we get every day that there’s a lot of people who have things in mind that they’d be willing to pay for. So we’ll get there, but probably not for at least a year.”
Figure 1’s HIPAA-compliant app allows healthcare professionals to share medical images organized by anatomy and specialty.Figure 1’s HIPAA-compliant app allows healthcare professionals to share medical images organized by anatomy and specialty, including X-Rays, MRIs, CAT scans, ECGs, and EKGs for teaching purposes and to attain feedback from their colleagues about possible diagnoses and treatments. The application is also serving as a study tool for preparing for the USMLE, NCLEX, and other medical licensing exams.
In August of last year, the company secured $4 million, and with this latest deal, they have raised a total of $9 million to date.
[Via: HitConsultant]