SiftMed, the St. John’s maker of software that helps law offices and insurance companies organize and search jumbled medical records, has been named Startup of the Year by techNL in the wake of securing its first paying clients.

SiftMed earlier this year raised a $2.7 million seed round led by Halifax-based Sandpiper Ventures, and CEO Holly Hill said in an interview Monday her team has used the ensuing eight months to secure its first paying clients. Most of the new customers are in Canada, with one insurance company in the United States.

She added that most of SiftMed’s sales prospects have so far been Canadian businesses, but in the first quarter of next year, she plans to increase her team’s focus on business development south of the border.

“Right now our pipeline has been a lot of inbound and referrals within Canada, and a lot of discussions from firms using us sharing it with other local firms,” said Hill. “I’m expecting to see the number of opportunities in our sales pipeline increase more on the U.S. side.”

One example of the organic growth to which Hill referred is SiftMed’s relationship with Newfoundland and Labrador law firm Roebothan McKay Marshall, which specializes in personal injury law and therefore regularly works with medical records.

“They came in as a local partner, but they’ve really helped us improve the application and scale it on a national level,” Hill said. “They were one of the partners we were working with at the data level (as in knowing what data to pull from records).”

When she and co-founder Dr. Jeremie Larouche, an orthopaedic surgeon, initially conceived of SiftMed, they saw it as a way to streamline Larouche’s own medical consulting business.

The duo’s technology uses natural language processing to automatically organize and categorize files, optical character recognition to make scanned documents searchable and more sophisticated artificial intelligence to extract key medical data from the files. The system has applications in the insurance industry and for law offices like Roebothan McKay Marshall.

SiftMed now has 18 employees, up from 15 in February and 11 this time last year. The new hires include a vice president of sales, whose responsibilities will include overseeing the team’s push into the American market.

Last week, the company was also one of five honourees at techNL’s 2023 Industry Awards as part of the organization's Innovation Week celebrations.

“It’s still early, but we have received, even at the event, a lot of funding agencies and groups offering support, wanting to share with us what programs are available for us to take part in," said Hill. "We’ve actually had a couple law firms reach out to us as a result of the event.

“It has generated some really positive hype around the business, which is very nice to see."