CareSync, a Tampa health care software firm that shuttered in late July, laying off some 300 people, has suffered one more ignominy: inclusion on PitchBook’s annual list of the top 10 venture capital-backed failures.
The venture capital data analytics site included CareSync on its Startup Graveyard 2018 list — the only Florida company, and one of only two not in New York City, Boston or Silicon Valley. (The other, software firm Apprenda, is based outside Albany, N.Y.) While CareSync didn’t have the valuation, say, of once high-and-mighty blood testing firm Theranos, which collapsed after raising $810 million, the could-have-been remains painful. CareSync, according to PitchBook, had been valued at $46 million and raised $26 million since it was founded in 2011.
CareSync created chronic disease management software that coordinates care among patients, family and caregivers. In a statement in late 2016, the company announced it planned to invest $4.5 million in a new headquarters facility in Tampa, where it hoped to hit 500 employees by the end of 2017. The company’s other employee base, where it had about 100 staffers, was in Wauchula in Hardee County.
But CareSync’s fortunes shifted dramatically in 2018. CEO Travis Bond left the firm, and in June a pending acquisition of the company fell through. That led to mass layoffs, both in Tampa and Wauchula. In July the company filed for an assignment for the benefit of creditors, in lieu of a bankruptcy, in the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit Court in Hillsborough County, according to a statement on its website. “This was a very difficult decision,” the company states, “and we know that it will have an impact on our customers and our employees.”