The startup aims to expand across Canada and the United States starting later this year.
Care Group of Companies, an Edmonton-based provider of a range of health tech solutions, has closed a C$2 million funding round with participation from Alberta Accelerate Fund III, funded by the Province of Alberta and managed by Yaletown Partners.
CARE Group says its platform is being used by the Central Alberta Child Advocacy Centre to provide mental health support to young people and their families.
Care Group said the all-in funding round also includes participation from strategic angel investors and a family office and will use the funds to expand into new markets in Canada and the U.S. later this year and into 2025. The company plans to hire to support its partnerships, Indigenous health, development and marketing teams as it expands.
The CARE group declined to say how much money it has raised so far.
Co-founded in 2019 by CEO and Director Ray Yue and COO Marline Aizouki, Care Group consists of three technology solutions focused on different parts of the healthcare system: EaseCare, InstaCare and CorpCare.
EaseCare offers publicly funded medical services, virtual mental health evaluations and doctor visits, as well as privately funded counseling and therapy. The InstaCare platform provides clinics with a dashboard for staff to prescribe medications, consolidate billing, and communicate across teams. The company's CorpCare service offers similar services to EaseCare and InstaCare, but focuses on businesses providing care for their employees.
“Millions of people, especially in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, are unable to get the care they need,” Yue said in a statement. “Our digital mental health technologies and programs are designed to meet the diverse needs of every person, in their own context, on their own schedule and at their own convenience.”
Accelerate Fund III was established in 2020 by Alberta Enterprise Corporation, an Alberta government subsidiary, to provide capital to early-stage Alberta technology startups to help them grow revenue and teams, bring products to market and secure initial customers.
Last July, Accelerate Fund III co-led a C$1.5 million seed round for Calgary-based WaitWell to help the company expand its queue management and servicing software and expand into new markets. The fund also backed Calgary emissions management company Arolytics in its C$3.5 million seed round to scale and expand into the U.S.
Care Group says its platform is used by the Central Alberta Child Advocacy Centre to provide mental health support to young people and their families. The company also says the list of people using Care Group for mental health and addictions support is “ever-growing” in urban, remote and Indigenous communities.
“As clinicians with decades of experience in healthcare, the founding team has a deep understanding of the needs and challenges from both the patient and provider perspective,” Yasmine Al-Hussein, investment associate at Accelerate Fund III, said in a statement. “We are impressed with CARE Group's strong drive to modernize and digitize mental health treatment within clinics and institutions, rural and Indigenous communities.”
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.
