MDisrupt, a marketplace for healthcare technology, has received a $1 million milestone-based investment from American Heart Association Ventures, the newly established venture firm that leads AHA's investments.

Texas-based MDisrupt also entered into a service agreement with the American Heart Association to co-develop a platform to connect experts and innovators. 

MDisrupt offers an AI-powered marketplace for healthcare technology, medtech and life sciences companies to connect experts with 10 years of experience and above with healthcare innovators to advise on building clinically valid companies that will positively affect the healthcare space. 

"We launched an AI-powered network matchmaking platform where clients can find the experts," Ruby Gadelrab, CEO and founder of MDisrupt, told MobiHealthNews. "We have AI-powered matching and transact with them so they can schedule their meetings. We take care of all of the contracting, we take care of liability insurance, we take care of all of the things that a clinician who wants to work in the industry does not want to take care of for themselves." 

The AHA has tens of thousands of members, including clinicians, scientists, researchers and business experts, many of whom will be available through the newly co-developed offering to contribute their expertise to innovators. 

"We often get asked, 'Can you hook me up with experts on this or that?'" Lisa Suennen, managing partner of American Heart Association Ventures, told MobiHealthNews. "People are looking for the expertise that our members have because they genuinely want to employ the best evidence, the best science, the best knowledge to their development of products and services for the market." 

Suennen said the AHA appreciated that MDisrupt cares about matching science and knowledge and that it was a startup.

"We liked that they were a young company, so they were amenable to collaborating on the product, on the growth, the trajectory, all the rest. If you work with a really big, late-stage company, they just want you as a customer; they don't want to hear from you. We wanted to be partners in this endeavor," Suennen said. 

The AHA provided a $1 million milestone-based investment to MDisrupt, the majority of which MDisrupt has already received.  

"We gave them three-quarters of the money upfront, and one quarter is dependent on launching the beta of the new product," Suennen said. "So, the successful beta launch of the next-generation product will give them the rest."

The platform the partners are co-developing will enable the AHA to make referrals to experts and disseminate evidence-based science to the broader world of innovation.  

The companies anticipate that the extended MDisrupt offerings that include AHA experts will be released in the second half of 2025. 

"We're going to be a big partner, and hopefully, this will help them grow significantly and get some additional credibility that will bring others to the table. We hope they're just wildly successful because if they are, we are," Suennen said. 

From MDisrupt's perspective, the offering will enable clinicians, scientists and people who understand healthcare to be at the industry table so the industry can make more responsible health products faster, Gadelrab said. 

"The ultimate mission is to actually find the most impactful healthcare products and bring them to market faster because they have the right regulatory people at the table, because they have the right clinicians and because they're solving the correct problem for health systems and for payers," relayed Gadelrab.  

"The impact, I believe, will be that we will see generation three of health tech and medtech products being much more evidence-based, much more clinically relevant, more integrated into clinical workflows and with a lot more evidence to support them, both for clinical outcomes and for their ROI story and budget impact analysis."