Durham, North Carolina-based Validic recently announced a $1.25 million convertible note from SJF Ventures and undisclosed angel investors. Validic CEO Ryan Beckland told MobiHealthNews that the new investment brings the company's total up to $2.1 million to date, but really serves as a bridge to get it to its series A round, which it is in the process of raising now.

Validic describes itself as the mobile health data conduit for healthcare companies, including wellness companies, providers, pharmaceuticals and health plans, and its end user population now totals about 33 million, Beckland said. The company's platform is registered as a Class 1 MDDS device with the FDA. Validic currently employs 17 full-time and plans to use the funding to build out its team, which Beckland said will likely double in size this year.

The recent funding also enables Validic to officially hire three executives: SVP of Business Development John Turnburke, SVP of Marketing Chris Edwards, and VP of Operations Ben Clark.

"We are in the process of raising our series A right now, but we decided to do this little note in advance of it, so that I could fill out the executive team and keep moving the ball forward," Beckland said. "That was the primary intention."

This year Validic is looking to fill positions on its development team, tech support team, implementation team, post-sale account managers, and sales positions, too.

The company also recently launched an offering called Validic Labs that aims to make it easier for early stage health app and device companies to work with the providers, health plans, and others that leverage Validic's mobile health data platform. The standard Validic deployment includes data integrations with a number of apps and devices from well-established companies like Omron, Fitbit, iHealth, Beckland said.

"The question we tried to answer [with Validic Labs was] if we are going to try to go get a thousand integrations this year -- which is hopefully what we can do -- how do our healthcare organization customers vet those?" Beckland said. "...Labs will bridge the gap to bring earlier stage companies to the healthcare customer. But Validic Labs is not a standard part of the deployment, so it is up to the customer which Validic Labs [partners] to deploy with and which patient populations to restrict those to, if applicable."

"You've also got to be cognizant of the customer's needs," Beckland continued. "and if you are a healthcare organization today, you might not be so keen on hanging your hat on an early stage, fresh-out-of-the-incubator company that has 'the hottest new mobile health analytics platform' or whatever. Validic Labs allows startups like that to come to us, connect, and [potentially] get access to our customer base. We will start highlighting them to our customers and help them get distribution, pilots, and partnerships. Some of these companies are going to take off, but we are going to do whatever we can to help facilitate new innovations coming into the healthcare ecosystem. That is exactly what the intention of Labs is."