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Led by team of serial entrepreneurs, new financing will expand sales, marketing and engineering capabilities to bring privacy to big data

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – (BUSINESS WIRE) – PHEMI, the company delivering security, privacy and governance insights through the promise of big data, today announced it has raised a $12.2 million round of venture financing to expand the commercialization phase of the company. Secured by a combination of new and existing investors, the financing was co-led by CTI Life Sciences Fund (CTI) and British Columbia Discovery Fund (Discovery Capital). It also included significant participation from early investors BDC Capital Healthcare Venture Fund and Yaletown Venture Partners.

“Enterprises of all sizes are recognizing the enormous opportunity for discovery and innovation buried in their data”

A team of serial entrepreneurs, Dr. Paul Terry, Adam Lorant and John Seminerio—with expertise in developing and commercializing innovative business and technology solutions for a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, telecommunications and high-performance computing— joined Chris Thompson and Alan Rabinowitz, two St. Paul’s Hospital cardiologists, in their start-up called PHEMI. With its initial focus in the healthcare and life sciences sectors, PHEMI will expand its focus to include a variety of data-driven communities, including public sector, insurance and financial services.

“Enterprises of all sizes are recognizing the enormous opportunity for discovery and innovation buried in their data,” said Dr. Paul Terry, president and CEO of PHEMI. “Data growth is massive—smart devices, the digitization of healthcare, genomics and other omics data, and dataflow from various sources such as email and the Internet—businesses must be able to take advantage of big data to remain competitive. Organizations that can move quickly to unlock their data silos, transform them into digital assets, and share this information, while protecting privacy and security, will win. With this additional capital, PHEMI will expand our sales, marketing and engineering efforts to ensure our partners and customers can use all of their data to create value and innovate.”

Innovative companies are striving to be more data-driven. PHEMI helps them unlock and share data without compromising privacy. PHEMI combines the scale and performance of big data with features that support rigorous security and performance, so enterprises can turn their focus from collecting and storing data to using it strategically, deriving insights to drive operational efficiencies, fuel innovation for competitive advantage, and lower costs. With the new financing in place, PHEMI will expand the sales channel for its award-winning solution, extending their solution offerings and sales reach through application and system integrator partners and data science expertise.

Dr. Shermaine Tilley, managing partner at CTI Life Sciences Fund stated: “Healthcare IT is an exciting and new investment direction for CTI. PHEMI’s unique solution and highly accomplished leadership team are on a rapid path to commercialization and we expect them to exceed expectations for current and prospective customers.”

“The big data market represents a tremendous growth opportunity for PHEMI in a variety of industries,” said Charles Cook, CMA for Discovery Capital. “PHEMI shares our vision for serving this segment of the market with a turnkey solution that helps organizations address the dual challenges of gathering data for insights while ensuring data privacy and security. We look forward to working with them as they evolve the way enterprises deploy big data and accelerate the rewards.”

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