Integration platform Bridge Connector draws investors

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. - With a seed investment of $4.5 million announced on June 5, Bridge Connector is officially open for business, says CEO and founder David Wenger.

Bridge Connector is an integration platform as service (iPaaS) that allows healthcare organizations, including HME companies, to transfer data between disparate systems without internal IT support.

“We're trying to be the solution that fixes the interoperability issue in health care,” said Wenger, whose company was launched in 2017 but has been in “stealth mode” until now. “We're trying to make it so that any sized organization, regardless of their budget, is able to integrate the different systems that they're using and streamline their data.”

The investment was led by Tampa-based emerging technologies firm Axioma Ventures, which is backed by Howard Jenkins, the former CEO of Publix Super Markets. Other investors include Alex Jenkins, co-founding partner of Axioma; Hannibal Baldwin, CFO of Baldwin Beach Capital and co-CEO of SiteZeus; and Jeffrey Wenger, M.D., a board-certified gastroenterologist.

Bridge Connector will use the investment to continue hiring developers and ramping up its support, sales and management teams. The company, which also has offices in Nashville and Knoxville, Tenn., has already hired Jason Raphael, formerly of Accenture, as vice president of client relations; Joshua Douglas as CTO; and Andy Harlen as vice president of sales.

“In January, we had six employees; now we have 25,” Wenger said.

Wenger can't name names, but he says a number of “large scale, enterprise-level HME providers” are using the platform. They use it do everything from marrying the different systems used by various companies that they've acquired, to integrating their fax machines with their customer relationship management platform.

“When a patient gets discharged from a hospital, there's hundreds of pieces of medical information that needs to be transmitted,” he said. “There's so much manual entry, and what we've done is automate the whole thing.”

Bridge Connector is available on a subscription model, Wenger says: It charges a fee per integration per month, depending on the “size and data flowing through our servers,” usually anywhere from $500 to $3,000.

“We feel like we've made an affordable and easy to implement solution, when the alternatives are paying for a middleware tool or an integration engine, or paying a third party,” he said.