A Queensland-based healthtech startup is looking to raise over $150 million via an initial coin offering to help medical patients secure their medical records and fetch second opinions from medical professionals.
DHealthNetwork launched a pre-sale for its token at the end of last week. The startup has an ambitious goal of selling 60 million of its DHT tokens by February 9, followed by two more tranches of 60 million tokens to be sold by March 9. These tokens can be purchased for a price of between 2000 to 1350 DHT per Ether contributed, leading to a potential total raise value of more than $150 million at current prices.
So far, the company has raised just $142 at time of publication, according to the company’s funding contract listed on its website.
DHealthNetwork was founded four years ago, but only recently completed a pivot to using blockchain technology. The company was previously focused on building its own decentralised storage systems through decentralised databases, however, after reading about blockchain technology such as the Ethereum blockchain, founder Ivan Jasenovic quickly realised the potential.
“As soon as I started to hear about developments in blockchain, I did a solid 48 hours of investigation. We put aside the last four years of work because I realised this is where we needed to be,” Jasenovic told StartupSmart.
“Blockchain technology inherently offers authenticated, immutable information. We were going to build out the whole infrastructure to offer this ourselves.”
DHealth’s main focus, says Jasenovic, is to better facilitate the sharing of medical information between patients and multiple medical practitioners, something he believes is currently stunting the industry and leading to patient misdiagnosis. He notes that the platform doesn’t actually store users’ health records on the blockchain, instead using the distributed ledger services to verify them.
“We’re leaving the actual medicine to doctors — we’re all about the communication, what works, what didn’t work,” he says.
“If somebody overseas with your exact symptoms tries cannabis oil and it works for them and you find out about it through our system, why can’t you become a medical tourist and go over there and test it out?”
The company is currently receiving advice from KPMG and Dubai-based business consultancy Telos Partners. Additionally, the company’s website lists advisors from Consensys, the blockchain development company founded by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin
“It [dHealthNetwork] may be the most comprehensive blockchain project to address the needs of healthcare consumers to institutional investors,” partner and advisor at KPMG Hamish Doley said in a statement.
According to Jasenovic, what sets dHealth apart from the numerous other health-focused blockchain networks out there is what the startup calls “Action Projects”. These work in a similar way to the NEM foundation’s community voted funding programs, where users can vote for projects by pledging a certain number of DHT tokens
The potential for these Action Projects goes beyond just medical, claims dHealth, with the company using examples such as building water pumps in remote villages, along with options such as cure/treatment development, or medicine distribution in developing nations.
As to why the startup would need $150 million to get off the ground where other local blockchain startups have seen success with far less, Jasenovic points to the Action Project concepts, saying 72% of the received funding would be going towards facilitating the projects.
“We only want to raise $18-20 million, but we’ve left the raise open-ended to have more money to pour into action projects,” he says.
The company has also developed what it claims to be an industry first: a cryptocurrency bond that maintains a stable value, called a digitally mined asset commodity (DMAC). This will be used to help investors support action projects without subjecting themselves to the volatility of the cryptocurrency market.
Although the company has some way to go until it reaches its lofty $20 million goal for funding, Jasenovic is confident, saying a number of institutional investors are waiting in the wings.
“We just need to point the address at them, and I think we’ll get our first $20 million in the next couple of days,” he says
The funding address for the company’s ICO is listed on its website.
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Dominic Powell is a journalist at SmartCompany and a tech and music geek. When he’s not writing, you can find him reading or browsing record shops.
