Healthcare-focused secure messaging company TigerText has raised $50 million led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from Invus Group and Accolade Partners, as well as existing investors Shasta Ventures, OrbiMed, and Reed Elsevier. This brings the company's total funding to $79.2 million.
TigerText offers a secure messaging app, available on iOS and Android devices, as well as an API called TigerConnect that allows partners to integrate secure messaging into other apps. Along with the funding announcement, TigerText also announced the TigerText Anywhere, initiative which expands the platform's features to other platforms, like desktop computers. Now users can access TigerText's secure messaging offering on iPhones, Android smartphones, desktop computers, Apple Watches, and the web.
The company also announced that they've added a Low Connectivity Protocol (LCP) across all of their offerings so that people can use TigerText even in areas with poor network connectivity.
“With over 250,000 paying users including four of the five largest for-profit health systems in the nation, TigerText has reached the scale necessary to truly improve the quality of care our healthcare customers deliver, while at the same time reducing the costs to do so,” TigerText CEO Brad Brooks said in a statement. “By connecting electronic health records, critical alerts, real time shift data, and other essential components of patient care and productivity, we think that secure, real-time messaging could save the healthcare industry $30-$50 billion a year... Our scale has further unlocked enormous opportunity for TigerConnect as many of our customers look to incorporate our TigerConnect iOS, Android and JavaScript SDKs into their applications as well.”
When MobiHealthNews talked to the company last year, TigerText explained that for its messaging app it offers a freemium pricing model where any doctor can start a TigerText network at his or her practice or hospital for free and use TigerText to communicate securely with any other doctor who signs on. The hospital or practice pays for the network only when they want to administer the network. Doctors who are affiliated with more than one practice can have multiple TigerText sign-ins on the same device.
TigerText has disclosed two previous investment rounds. The most recent one was announced in January 2014 and before that the company announced a round in February 2012.
Another healthcare-focused communications company, Voalte, also recently announced funding that brought its total known funding to around $60 million. In September, Voalte raised another $7 million, completing at $17 million round from Ascension Ventures, the venture arm of the health system, Cerner Capital, an affiliate of Cerner Corporation, and Bedford Funding.
