Digital healthcare learning platform OnlineMedEd brought in $20 million in a growth round to create content for global health care delivery providers.
Lumos Capital Group led the new financing, which gives OnlineMedEd a total of $25.6 million in funding since Jamie Fitch and Dustyn Williams co-founded the Austin-based company in 2014, Fitch told Crunchbase News.
The new funding comes nearly a year after OnlineMedEd raised $5 million in seed funding from an undisclosed network of 20 physician investors to expand its educational content beyond medical school walls to more than 60 million healthcare professionals at all levels.
“Since the last round in July, we have made resources and transitioned people into hospitals to help with COVID,” Fitch said. “Schools and institutions have recognized problems are not going away. They recognize teaching needs to change. Students like to be at home in pajamas when they can be. Therefore, schools want to use time most efficiently, and they want to go to a hybrid model.”
Traditionally focused on students, the company also attracted new users; practicing providers and faculty. Over the past year, OnlineMedEd launched its Crash Course suite of free online video tutorials to more than 30,000 redeployed health care providers helping during the pandemic. In addition, the company transitioned medical school faculty online.
Currently, more than 86 percent of medical students in the United States use OnlineMedEd to supplement knowledge needed to pass their board exams, as well as in their clinical practice. In addition, 250,000 monthly active users learn from the platform, while an average of 50,000 are global users. This is up more than 50 percent over the past year, Fitch said.
OnlineMedEd intends to use the new funding to develop content and a distribution channel for the expansion of its platform globally. It already has plans to launch in Ireland and India in 2021.
“This is about the international opportunity. COVID impacted the entire world and demonstrated the infrastructure problems for health care,” Fitch said. “We want to help people learn about medicine where they are. This is universal, but there are specific diseases in Africa or Asia, so we want to create content for that and get as many people as possible access to the tools.”
Speaking of Fitch, co-founder and managing partner of Lumos Capital Group, a growth equity firm investing in education and human capital development, James Tieng said in an interview that he has been tracking the medical education space for a while, and met at a conference.
“His energy and passion came across immediately, and his business acumen is impressive,” Tieng said. “OnlineMedEd providing premium content to any student matters quite a bit. It is a larger opportunity beyond core medical students and evidence that it is a global platform for learning. There will be success stories past COVID, and this is one of them.”
