Jane has acquired Vancouver startup Ginger Desk, adding clinic administration services in what appears to be its first public acquisition.
Ginger Desk founder and chief executive Julie Durnan, a naturopathic doctor, announced the deal in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday.
She said the startup had been acquired three months earlier by Vancouver-based health tech software company Jane Software, known as Jane App.
Jane provides a software platform for running health clinics online, while Ginger Desk offers trained virtual assistants who manage patient and booking workflows.
The assistants are people working remotely rather than automated bots.
BetaKit said it had contacted Jane App for more information about the acquisition.
“Jane welcomed all 53 members of the Ginger Desk team, and watching them not only find a home here, but truly thrive has been one of the greatest joys of my career,” Durnan, who is now Jane’s head of services, wrote on LinkedIn.
The deal appears to be Jane’s first publicly announced acquisition of another company.
It comes a year after the clinic software provider was reportedly set to reach a C$1.8bn valuation, making it a Canadian technology unicorn.
According to a company blog post published in April, more than 240,000 practitioners across 40 disciplines use Jane to run their private practices.
Jane’s growth has come as Canada’s private healthcare sector has expanded, with total private-sector health spending forecast to rise by 5.2 per cent in 2025.
In Ontario, for example, the government has awarded new funding to expand private, for-profit health clinics.
Durnan’s experience founding Ginger Desk is similar to the story behind Jane App.
Co-founders Alison Taylor and Trevor Johnston launched Jane as a side project in 2014 to help manage Taylor’s clinic of physiotherapists, chiropractors and other practitioners.
Durnan, a registered naturopathic doctor, launched Ginger Desk from her own clinic to help manage administrative work.
Both companies also raised relatively little capital before becoming profitable.
