Durham, North Carolina-based health data platform company Validic has raised $5 million in first round funding, co-led by Greycroft Partners and SJF Ventures. Existing VCs and angels also contributed, according to Validic CEO Ryan Beckland. Beckland says the funding round, which brings Validic's total funding to a little over $7 million, will help them keep up with fast growth and tremendous demand.

"We started out March of 2013, with very few users, we’re now deployed to 72 million lives in seven countries," he told MobiHealthNews. "That’s significant infrastructure, significant staff costs, sales support, organization, to be able to keep up with demand. It’s just been crazy and we needed some investment to fuel that growth and that’s why we did the investment round."

This is Validic's third funding round and by far its largest. The company received a $1.25 million convertible note from SJF Ventures in March. Prior to that, last fall, it raised $670,000 in seed funding including an investment from Shark Tank's Mark Cuban.

Validic works with hospitals and healthcare providers to help them integrate data streams from many different apps and devices into one secure, easy-to-interact with pipe. This includes consumer devices like Fitbit and Jawbone, sports devices like Polar and Garmin, and, increasingly, medical devices -- anything that connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth.

"On the hospital level there are major challenges to integrate all these different devices, and yet it’s what needs to happen in order to take our healthcare system into the future," Beckland said. "When Validic comes along, we say ‘Look, you don’t have to worry about building all these integrations’ it’s like a load off their mind. It’s the solution everybody was looking for but nobody knew what they were looking for."

Last month, Validic acquired their former partner Infometer. As MobiHealthNews reported at the time, the Infometer acquisition will allow Validic to focus more on clinical devices than it had previously. This is because Valdic's existing technology works on the API side, which only allows them to integrate with devices that already have their own companion app. But Infometer's technology works on the SDK side, allowing Validic to grab data directly from devices, including those that might not have an app.

"Our focus going forward is very clearly on clinical data and clinical devices," Beckland said. "We’re going to see a lot of that in the next year or so."

Beckland said that the recent attention on mobile health from Apple, Google, and Samsung doesn't really constitute competition from Validic, since those companies are all focused on consumer-facing, rather than provider-facing, integration. In fact, he said he expected the additional attention to create more users of mobile health, which would in turn create additional customers for Validic.