Capital raise: Sitemate, Carepatron secure a collective $13.6m

A ‘no-code’ start-up for manufacturing, and a medtech platform aiming to offer solutions for medical practices have raised a collective $13.6m.

Sitemate co-founder and chief executive Hartley Pike.

A start-up which has built a no-code platform for manufacturing and design, and a medtech which wants to be an all-in-one solution for GPs and other medical practices have raised a collective $13.6m.

Sitemate, founded by two UTS students who met at the university’s start-up lab in 2016, has secured $7.5m as part of a Series A raising.

Co-founder Hartley Pike, a civil engineer by trade, has big plans for the business which has more than trebled its headcount to now number 70 staff.

Sitemate operates as a “no-code” platform – and uses software which lets customers build and deploy applications without having to know how to code.

“The general philosophy is that people know their own jobs better than others. We believe our job is to understand what they need but put them in the driving seat and allow them to build and deploy tools as they need,” Mr Pike said.

The idea was born out of Mr Pike’s own frustrations during his early days as an engineer.

“My background is civil and structural engineering, I used to be building roads, bridges and tunnels out in the field and I really experienced first hand a lot of the inefficiencies of manual processes in the built world,” he said.

Sitemate’s other co-founder, Sam McDonnel, and Mr Pike slaved away in their university’s basement when they first began to build the business.

“We sort of floated around the university for probably about a year working out of different parts of the building before we got into the Startmate accelerator program,” he said.

The business has big plans for the new capital, and wants to double its headcount to 140 by the end of next year. The primary focus has been on hiring more staff to work in its product and engineering departments.

“We didn’t actually need the money to continue to grow but it has allowed us to move forward on new initiatives and our go-to-market strategies in Europe and North America,” Mr Pike said.

The start-up isn’t finished raising capital either. It’s understood to be looking to double the initial $7.5m over the next few months before it closes its series A round.

Marbruck Investments led the round for Sitemate, with participation from existing investor Blackbird Ventures and Artesian. Blackbird led the start-ups seed round where it bagged $5.2m.

Carepatron founder David Pene, head of design Nicole Crosby, engineering manager Julian Robinson and co-founder Jamie Frew.

Meanwhile, a New Zealand medtech start-up, also backed by Blackbird Ventures, has announced it had raised significant amount of capital this week.

Carepatron, which was founded by former senior Xero software engineer David Pene and former Telstra partner and ANZ global talent manager Jamie Frew, raised $US4m ($6.15m).

Both founders are married to healthcare workers; Mr Crew’s wife is a clinical psychologist and Mr Pene’s wife is a doctor.

The pair, who live so close they’re almost neighbours, often meet to work out of a community garden in Tauranga, about 225km southeast of Auckland.

Mr Frew grew up in a local community hospital run by his parents. He and his family lived in the building.

“After school, other kids would come home and mow the lawn and I would conduct glucose testing,” he said. “I think I developed a real empathy for what it takes to kind of run and provide these services.”

Carepatron has had some early success entering other markets, landing customers in the US, the UK and even Malaysia – having entered more than 50 markets.

One of the platform’s biggest selling points was that access to other health providers in other markets, as it was able to apply industry-based learning to set up workspaces for new customers instantly, Mr Pene said.

That kind of tooling is “revolutionary”, Mr Pene said. “Because Carepatron holds a plethora of really rich data from all of these different countries and different professions; when you come on to the platform as a new practitioner, at the click of a button you’ll have the best practice way of running your business,” he said.

“We know all of the people that kind of look like you and work like you and your profession and your geography.”

The platform went against the grain. Transcription tooling, appointments, scheduling, automated workflow tools and billing and payments were built in-house.

“Everybody told us not to do that and we did the complete opposite and built it all from scratch. It was 100 per cent the hardest thing to do but we’re starting to see it bear fruit now,” Mr Pene said.

Asked why the start-up decided to build all tools in house, Mr Pene said: “One of the biggest problems in healthcare is that the traditional software was built about 20 years ago and it costs a fortune to use. If you try to integrate that, you’re at the mercy of those businesses,” he said.

“By building it from scratch we can offer those products at whatever price we want. We can significantly bring the price of the software down so it’s affordable for people in different countries.”

Carepatron wants to add another 10 to 20 staff to its team over the next few months.

Blackbird investment partner Phoebe Harrop said that what really attracted the venture capital firm to Carepatron was “what was really clear was the connection to healthcare”.

Ms Harrop said Blackbird admired Mr Frew’s passion for seeing the kind of inefficient software his wife had to deal with and trying to solve that – and Mr Pene’s vision for how small businesses could thrive, which he’d learned through his time at Xero.

“These are two wild hearts who are first-time founders but have a really clear idea of who they want to help and what kind of experience they want to create,” she said.

“And they are also thinking very globally which is something that’s important to us. They may be building the company in New Zealand but it’s very much a global product and that kind of ambition resonates with Blackbird’s mission and who we’re here to back.”