Milwaukee-based Sift Medical Data Inc. has closed on its latest funding round at $1 million.
The company was working to raise $1.1 million as of August, and at that point had just more than $800,000 committed. The lead investor on the round was Neenah-based Winnebago Seed Fund, which also led Sift’s $665,000 seed funding round in 2017.
Madison-based payment processing firm Wind River Financial also participated in this round, and will partner with Sift to offer workflow intelligence, reimbursement performance intelligence and patient financial interaction intelligence to health care organizations.
Sift Medical has eight employees, two of whom were added in the past quarter. Founder and chief executive officer Justin Nicols plans to hire another four to five employees in early 2019. The company recently moved its headquarters from a 1,200-square-foot space at 735 N. Water St. in downtown Milwaukee to a 1,500-square-foot space at 220 E. Buffalo St. in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward, where it has more offices and room to expand, he said.
Nicols is already looking ahead to Sift’s Series A round, which he plans to launch in late spring. And the company is getting ready to participate in a startup program, the name of which which he said he could not yet disclose.
Sift, established in 2013 and previously known as Small Biz Collections LLC and Remindabill Inc., helps normalize insurance claims and insurance payment data to help medical providers draw analytics from the information. For example, a provider could predict a patient’s propensity to pay, and the optimal bill amount to put in front of a patient based on their ability to pay, Nicols said.
The startup has found traction in the market as the patient responsibility for health care costs has grown to be a larger portion of providers’ revenue, now at about 30 percent, he said. Sift’s customers are health care providers and the first-party billing companies to which they outsource collections.
