A couple years ago, when Alex Fair was tossing around ideas on how to raise money for his new healthcare marketplace, FairCareMD, he knew that putting the startup on the uber-popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter would be out of the question. Kickstarter has collected $250 million for 24,000 projects since it was founded three years ago, but virtually none of that has gone to health-related companies. “I said, ‘Hey, there’s an opportunity here,’” Fair says. “No one’s really doing health care crowdfunding.”
Enter MedStartr, Fair’s New York-based site that’s making its debut today. MedStartr allows entrepreneurs to find backers for healthcare technologies and services. The site, which Fair says ran a brief alpha test starting in April, is launching with six projects, including MedStartr itself. During that early project, which was designed to test the concept, Fair was surprised to find MedStartr was able to raise enough capital to run the company. “Of the 71 people we invited to view the alpha, six invested,” he says. It’s a sign, he believes, that “crowdfunding has hit the public consciousness.”