On the 29th July, HCXI announced its investment from Washington based equity fund Payment Ventures. The blockchain startup only released its payment platform, HCX PAY, in November of last year.
HCX PAY specializes in healthcare insurance payments and uses a private coin. The Tennessee based firm hopes to facilitate the adoption of blockchain to increase transparency and free data flow between patients and insurers. The new investment will be sure to aid the company’s growth.
Health insurance payments is an active area. IBM has a blockchain health consortium with major insurers United Health Group, Anthem, Aetna, Humana and Cigna. Plus PNC Bank is part of the group to explore new payment models.
Change Healthcare, which has major blockchain initiatives, processes $1 trillion healthcare claims a year and is especially big in claims settlement and payment.
Still in the early stages, HCXI also plans to branch out from payment transactions to develop more advanced DLT solutions. For instance, the firm’s data sovereignty project is slated to begin in 2021. The initiative promises to build a blockchain-based application to manage the security and distribution of consumer-owned data.
The HCXI announcement also reveals new advisory roles for data scientist Dr Igor Korolev and Payment Ventures’ Tony VanBrackle. Though his firm is relatively select with investments at the seed level, “Tony has an impressive track record as a successful entrepreneur, investor, and advisor,” said Cyrus Maaghul, CEO of HCXI.
VanBrackle holds several other directorships and advisory roles including for payments firm CardFlight. He was the founder of Solveras Payment Solutions which was sold to TransFirst in 2011. TSYS, in turn, acquired TransFirst for $2.35 billion in 2016.
Meanwhile, Dr Korolev uses his neuroscience degrees in machine learning and predictive models, now considered an expert in the field. Maaghul himself was the Director of Blockchain Product Development at Fidelity’s blockchain investments arm before founding HCXI. He also held roles at Citibank and Deloitte.
With new investment and a growing advisory board, HCXI hopes to expand its blockchain risk management and data sovereignty initiatives.
