Durham, North Carolina-based RelayOne has raised $500,000 in seed funding from Cofounders Capital, a tech-focused venture fund located in Cary, North Carolina.

WHAT THEY DO

Founded by two frustrated medical device sales reps, RelayOne is focused on solving communication issues in the operating room.

The crux of the problem is that surgeries can often take a longer or shorter time than expected, meaning that the operating room schedule is subject to frequent changes, according to the company. Those schedule changes need to be communicated to a lot of people, and it's easy for those people to fall through the cracks.

“The best way for us to evaluate an investment opportunity is to talk to potential customers about their pain points, and understand if we have a product that solves them,” Tim McLoughlin, a partner at Cofounders Capital who is joining the company’s board, said in a statement. “RelayOne has clearly done that. I could not believe the stories I heard of hospitals having to cancel surgeries last minute or vendors driving hours just to find out that a surgery had been rescheduled. I enjoyed telling them that we have created a solution.”

RelayOne has created a secure software platform that disseminates that scheduling information to all the relevant stakeholders in real time. It works with EHRs and is designed to be HIPAA-compliant.

It’s also designed to be user-friendly. The team includes engineers who built the now-defunct anonymous chat app YikYak, founder and CEO Cam Sexton told MobIHealthNews in an email.

WHAT IT’S FOR

RelayOne has developed the software, but will now use the new funding to launch it. Specifically, Sexton told MobiHealthNews, the company has contracts lined up with two large health systems.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

Clinical communication in general is a fairly well-developed and crowded space, dominated by big names like Spok, Voalte and TigerConnect (formerly TigerText).

Even the surgical space specifically isn’t empty of competitors. CaseTabs raised $6 million last year for a similar offering and DocSpera has been at it since 2013.

ON THE RECORD

“We designed RelayOne knowing that for hospitals, bringing in new software can be a painful experience,” Sexton said in a statement. “We created a solution and applied our unique combination of healthcare sales and consumer app experience to build a platform that’s easy to use and drastically improves hospital operations.”