Health tech & hospital operations · Surplus medical equipment
Medinas Health
A cloud based marketplace and software platform that helped hospitals value, redeploy and resell their surplus medical equipment. It raised seed funding from 2017 through 2019, then closed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A grandmother's hospital room
In 2015, Chloe Alpert's grandmother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Alpert spent months in and out of hospitals with her, noticing the same thing on the bills and in the hallways: rooms full of medical equipment nobody was using.
“In 2015, my grandmother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer,” Alpert said in a 2020 interview. “I spent many months in and out of hospitals, and while there I noticed how often wasted medical supplies appeared on bills. I saw rooms full of unused equipment.” A year later she met someone running a nonprofit that shipped millions of dollars of surplus hospital supplies overseas to clinics that needed them. Alpert concluded that hospitals needed software, not charity, to fix the supply chain problem. Medinas Health was her answer.
The problem: spreadsheets and a $765 billion number
Medinas Health's pitch was that the United States wastes about $765 billion a year in healthcare spending, much of it sitting in equipment hospitals buy, barely use and let go to waste rather than resell. Reporting on its 2019 round sized the market: over 6,200 hospitals, 9,200 surgery centers, 7,000 imaging centers and 166,000 dental clinics, most tracking equipment with spreadsheets, in a secondary market the company put at $156 billion.
Medinas Health's software replaced that spreadsheet process with what it called the Medinas Price Book, a database the company said drew on more than 9 million data points to value used equipment, plus tools to redeploy equipment between facilities or list it for sale to other buyers.
Four founders
Medinas Health's founders were Chloe Alpert, Jesse Avshalomov, Timothy Growney and Romy Seth, listed together on the 2018 SEC filing as officers, directors and promoters, and named together in Forbes' 2017 Change the World announcement. Alpert served as CEO throughout. Before Medinas, she had built and shut down a first startup by age 23, then started Savon Body, an online soap company, and later Happy Pay, a promotions company.
From a Boston stage to a Berkeley office
Early momentum came from competitions as much as venture rounds. In October 2017 it won the $500,000 Forbes Under 30 Global Change the World competition in Boston, judged in part by Sound Ventures founders Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, with $100,000 each from Sound Ventures and Rough Draft Ventures plus $300,000 of Forbes media placement.
A Form D filed Feb 21, 2018 shows the first outside equity sale on Feb 6, 2018, and by March 15, 2018 Medinas Health announced the round closed: $1 million, co-led by Sound Ventures and Rough Draft Ventures, with Precursor Ventures, Trammell Ventures and angels. The company said it would use the money to pilot its platform with partner hospitals in mid-2018.
That summer, Medinas Health went through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch, presenting at YC's August 2018 demo day. In January 2019 it won $1 million at WeWork's Global Creator Awards finals, after taking $360,000 at the San Francisco regional round the year before.
A second, larger round followed on an unusual timeline. The company told Crunchbase News it closed $5 million in November 2018, then spent roughly a year on what its CEO called “pure research” before announcing the round on October 22, 2019, led by NFX with Precursor Ventures, Sound Ventures, FJ Labs and investor Bryan Frist. By then Medinas Health had signed 55 healthcare organizations, concentrated in Florida, New York and Arizona, and had shipped equipment as far as CT scanners to Cambodia, ventilators to India and defibrillators to Mexico.
In March 2020 the company's own site posted a campaign called Raise the Line aimed at helping hospitals respond to Covid-19, a period when demand for used ventilators spiked briefly before hospital capital budgets tightened for years afterward.
Ceasing operations
Archived captures of medinas.com show the site fully operational as late as December 3, 2021. By January 14, 2022, the domain showed a single notice: “It is with heavy hearts today that we announce that Medinas Health is ceasing operations. Unfortunately due to the pressures of Covid-19 and the pandemic, we are left with no other choice but to close our doors.” No later capture of the company's own site has been found. By September 2026, medinas.com instead hosted the site of TAB Xchange, a Vernon Hills, Illinois liquidation company with no public link to Medinas Health's founders or assets. The domain likely lapsed and was registered by an unrelated buyer, but no record confirms how it changed hands.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| SEC Form D | Filed Feb 21, 2018 by Medinas, Inc. First sale Feb 6, 2018. Offered $1,000,000, sold $940,000 from 9 investors. The only SEC filing that mentions the company. | Public record |
| Second seed round | Press describes a $5 million round closed Nov 2018, announced Oct 2019. No Form D covers it; EDGAR full text search for “Medinas” finds only the 2018 filing. | Not found in SEC filings |
| Y Combinator batch | Appears in TechCrunch's writeup of YC's Summer 2018 demo day, confirming the batch independent of the company's own claim. | Independent |
| Customer count | 55 healthcare organizations, mainly in Florida, New York and Arizona, per Crunchbase News, Oct 2019, from an interview with the CEO. No hospital system named. | Independent |
| Savings claim | Company said its platform helped hospitals save more than $50 million in “sales equivalency.” No methodology or audit found. | Company-stated |
| Total funding raised | Press describes $1M (2018) plus $5M (2019), about $6M combined. Tracxn lists $7.06M across 5 rounds. Forbes' CEO profile, updated Dec 2025, says “more than $5 million.” The figures do not agree. | Differs across sources |
| FDA, trials, NIH, NSF, PubMed | No FDA record, registered trial, NIH or NSF award, or PubMed listing found. Expected for a resale marketplace, not a device or drug developer. | Not applicable |
| Closure | Archived medinas.com shows the site operating Dec 3, 2021, replaced with a closure notice by Jan 14, 2022, citing Covid-19 pandemic pressure. | Public record |
Read plainly: the 2018 round is backed by an SEC filing with real numbers attached. The larger 2019 round rests entirely on press accounts and an interview, with no federal filing to check it against, and third party funding estimates do not line up with each other. The customer and savings figures were never independently audited in anything found here. Its closure is documented directly, in the company's own words, via an archived capture of its site.
What to watch
- Whether an amended Form D ever surfaces for the 2018 or 2019 round.
- Any public account of what happened to Medinas Health's contracts or assets after closing.
- How the medinas.com domain passed to TAB Xchange, an unrelated company.
In their words
“In 2015, my grandmother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. I spent many months in and out of hospitals, and while there I noticed how often wasted medical supplies appeared on bills. I saw rooms full of unused equipment.”
Chloe Alpert, CEO and co-founder, 2020 interview · Interview
“Our software replaces a bloated tangle of confusing, expensive legacy products. We allow hospital personnel to easily manage their assets, figure out their worth, and remarket or redeploy unneeded assets with one intuitive software product.”
Chloe Alpert, 2020 interview · Interview
“We are a team of engineers, product specialists, medical professionals and healthcare investors and we are all working together.”
Chloe Alpert, Forbes Change the World pitch, quoted Mar 2018 release · Company release
“NFX has spent decades learning how market networks thrive. Their experience is going to help drive Medinas to national and international success.”
Chloe Alpert, Oct 2019 funding release · Company release
“This is a classic market network, we have hundreds of thousands of businesses exchanging billions of dollars of value offline. It's currently time-consuming, repetitive, error-prone, wasteful and risky. Medinas solves this problem.”
James Currier, Managing Partner, NFX, Oct 2019 · Investor
“Hospital CFOs realize they're wasting billions of dollars with their current processes. Medinas is finally bringing modern software to the table to solve this problem as many other industries have already experienced.”
Charles Hudson, Managing Partner, Precursor Ventures, Oct 2019 · Investor
“The whole point is that it is impossible for a person to remember 150 steps, but software can do that, so you'll get a perfectly streamlined interaction.”
Chloe Alpert, to Crunchbase News, Oct 2019 · Interview
“It is with heavy hearts today that we announce that Medinas Health is ceasing operations. Unfortunately due to the pressures of Covid-19 and the pandemic, we are left with no other choice but to close our doors.”
Medinas Health, closure notice on medinas.com, by Jan 14, 2022 · Company statement
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Medinas, Inc., CIK 0001730717
- Public recordSEC EDGAR full text search for “Medinas”
- Public recordWayback Machine capture of medinas.com, site operational
- Company statementWayback Machine capture of medinas.com, closure notice
- Independentmedinas.com current site, TAB Xchange
- IndependentAll 59 startups that launched today at Y Combinator's S18 demo day 2
- CompanyMedinas Health Closes $1 Million Seed Round Co-led by Ashton Kutcher & Guy Oseary's Sound Ventures and General Catalyst's Rough Draft Ventures
- IndependentMedinas Raises $5M Seed For Its Healthcare Equipment Marketplace
- IndependentMedinas Raises $5M to Expand Pre-Owned Medical Equipment Marketplace
- AwardMedinas Wins $500,000 Forbes Under 30 Summit's Global Change The World For-Profit Competition
- InterviewChloe Alpert, CEO and Co-Founder of Medinas Health
- IndependentChloe Alpert profile
- IndependentMedinas Health: Building a Medical Equipment Marketplace
- AggregatorMedinas company profile, funding and founders
- CompanyTAB Auctions Announces Rebranding and New Name to TAB Xchange
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
