Crowdfunding Healthcare Startups – Medstartr And Indiegogo

John Lynn | EMR & HIPAA | October 5, 2012

I have been seeing more and more activity around the idea of using the crowds to fund various healthcare IT startup companies. This shouldn’t be that surprising to any of us given the success of websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. They’ve created a whole new way to raise money for passion projects. Plus, as they’ve grown they’ve shown a new way to see if your customer really wants what you plan to offer.

One challenge is that Kickstarter generally hasn’t approved healthcare startup company projects on their platform. In fact, a whole company was born to try and help solve the problem of making crowdfunding available to healthcare. This company is called MedStartr.

I’ve been keeping an eye on it for quite a while. So far they’ve had some successes with these projects getting funding: Medstartr, The Walking Gallery, Peer-to-Peer Global Support for Rare Disease, and Avado. Plus, Reconstruction Bras for Breast Cancer Survivors and Previvors have met their goal, but are still raising money.