The St. John's startup closed a $5M seed round led by Staircase Ventures. Revenue is doubling every six months, and the company plans a Series A within 18 months.
Alpha Score of 42 reflects weak overall profile with strong momentum, poor value, moderate quality, poor sentiment.
SiftMed, a St. John's-based startup, has closed a $5 million CAD seed round to expand its AI-powered medical claim document review software. The all-equity round closed last month and was led by Toronto's Staircase Ventures, with Calgary's The51 joining as a new investor. Existing backers Pelorus VC, Sandpiper Ventures, and founders of Verafin also participated.
The company's software ingests and structures thousands of pages of medical records, then uses AI to surface evidence relevant to insurance claims. Co-founder and CEO Holly Hill said in an interview that human reviewers can take hours to days to comb through the same material. SiftMed can reach decisions in two hours or less, depending on the review type.
Hill traced the company's founding to a case involving a young California man paralyzed after a motorcycle accident. Co-founder Dr. Jeremie Larouche, an orthopaedic surgeon and independent medical examiner, found a handwritten nurse's note on page 13,151 of the man's records. The note showed the paralysis occurred after the hospital failed to put the man in a back brace, not from the crash itself. Larouche and Hill launched SiftMed in 2020.
SiftMed's 30-person team includes former staff from Verafin, the St. John's fraud detection company that sold to Nasdaq for $2.75 billion USD in 2020.
Hill declined to share SiftMed's valuation but said the round priced significantly higher than its two prior seed financings, which raised $2.7 million CAD each in 2023 and 2025. The startup has raised nearly $11 million to date. Hill expects SiftMed to pursue a larger Series A within 12 to 18 months.
Staircase founder and managing partner Janet Bannister said SiftMed is more than doubling revenue every six months, which she attributed partly to the accuracy of its products. Bannister sees potential for the company to become "part of every medical claim in North America."
"They are tackling the $26-billion medical claims review process with an AI-based solution that is superior to anything on the market," Bannister said.
AI-powered medical claim review has drawn scrutiny. Stanford Law School health policy professor Michelle Mello and colleagues wrote in a recent Health Affairs article that "a major worry is that wrongful denials may be occurring as a result of a lack of meaningful human review of recommendations made by AI."
Hill framed the company's mission differently. "Our mission is to uncover facts that change lives," she said.
Prepared with AlphaScala editorial tooling from the source reporting linked above. Indexable analysis may include a cited Alpha Score value. Publishing checks screen each story before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.