Just about a year ago, we introduced our Stockhouse investor audience to a soon-to-be publicly listed company that was revolutionizing the digital and virtual healthcare space. Fast-forward to today and
Cloud DX Inc. (
TSX-V.CDX,
OTC: CDXFF,
Forum) is now publicly trading on the TSX Venture Exchange and making waves in the markets and in the highly-regulated digital healthcare industry.
Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson was joined, once again, by Company CEO, Founder & President Robert Kaul to update our audience on all things Cloud DX.
(CLICK IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO)
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: To start off with, and for those that may not have seen your previous interview with us, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the history of the company?
RK: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. I am a serial entrepreneur. I am a Canadian citizen but I live in New York city where we have our US headquarters. This is my sixth start up and Cloud DX has been in business now since 2014. So we're seven and a half years old. We now have grown to 58 employees, two offices and many of our employees of course are virtual now across North America and as you just mentioned, of course, we're publicly traded on the TSXV. We're also exchange available in the OTCQB in the US and we're very excited to be here and to talk to you.
SH: Can you update our investor audience and your Cloud DX shareholders on any new company developments, especially in the wake of COVID-19 and the Omicron variant?
RK: Being in the virtual care business, the whole world has now moved into a point where virtual care is very accepted. We're all getting more and more comfortable with visiting with our doctors on zoom and caring for ourselves at home, rather than trying to go to the hospital, go to the emergency room, go to the urgent care, partly because of the pandemic but also partly because of just convenience and just ease of use. So the pandemic itself has changed the way care is being deliberate all over the world, but especially here in north America. So that's been very important to cloud DX. We saw a lot of growth in 2020 and 2021 cause of changes made to the virtual care delivery platforms but now what Omicron has done I think is it's been a bit of a distraction. I think many companies can say that but now of course, that the wave is receding. We're really getting down and getting back to business and recent announcements, cloud DX has made partnerships, new contracts, new growth, all reflect that incredible adoption of virtual care.
SH: You just announced an agreement to leverage Cloud DX's Connected Health Kit with Equitable Life of Canada. Can you expand on this initiative for our investor audience?
RK: Dave, this is a very important new type of customer, a new type of platform for delivery of care because up until this announcement in general, virtual care was delivered by healthcare systems, by doctors and by hospitals. Equitable life to our knowledge is first mutual insurance company to offer actual virtual care to all of the members in their critical illness insurance business. So Equitable itself is paying Cloud DX to deliver care for free to their users, to their critical injury clients. If you make a critical injury claim now at equitable life, you not only get at a check, but you also get care from Cloud DX. This proves in my opinion, that the concept of virtual care is now transforming more than just healthcare. It's transforming insurance, it's transforming the workplace, and we're on the absolute forefront as leaders of that change.
SH: The company has also recently been named to the 2022 New Innovators List by Canadian Business and the Brookfield Institute. Always nice to be awarded for your accomplishments!
RK: We're very proud of these awards. Cloud Dx has earned many, many awards for innovation over the years. We're probably one of the most awarded companies in this sector, if not the most. We're excited because of two reasons. Many of these awards are very competitive, so they are a very much genuine stamp of approval and credibility because they've been awarded after very careful vetting. So it really lifts Cloud DX up is an absolute leader in innovation, many awards. This is an exception but many of these awards that we've earned, like the XPR award, the NCI awards, and so on also come with non diluted funding and that of course should make investors very happy.
SH: Speaking of kudos, Cloud DX has just revealed its market award-winning, patented metaverse application. This may be news to many investors. Can you unpack the benefits of it?
RK: You know, there's a lot of buzz and a lot of interest in the metaverse these days and the metaverse is a term that many folks aren't even sure what it means yet. Does it mean cryptocurrency, does it mean video games online, does it mean virtual and artificial augmented realities? We've actually had what we call a metaverse project in the works for six years and so what our metaverse platform allows clinicians, doctors, and nurses to do is collaborate on the care of a patient, wearing a HoloLens headset from Microsoft or using an iPad with the Apple AR kit on there and interacting with multiple clinicians and patients in a virtual space in a way that they're very comfortable with this expands the reach of virtual care in a whole brand new way. The reason investors should care about it though, it proves that Cloud DX technology is future proof. Our hospital customers don't have to worry about trying to replace Cloud DX technology in five or six years with some other new thing. Cause we are the new thing, Dave, we're the ones bringing the future to the table and that actually de-risks purchasing Cloud DX for our customers.
SH: The Company looks set for strong growth in 2022. How are you placed to expand operations to meet demand?
RK: That's a great question, Dave. So there's really a couple of exciting things to point out here. We were very fortunate during the pandemic and during 2021 to receive substantial non dilutive government support in the form of grants from the next generation super cluster, the digital super cluster, fed dev Ontario and others to expand our footprint in order to scale up. That funding has allowed us to increase our, the size of our warehousing and office and logistics in both Canada and the US, preparing us for strong growth and again, this was non dilutive funding, which is very important. The second thing is it's allowed us to grow the team very much in the us. The team is increasing but sales, marketing, and logistics as well and the third point of course is extremely powerful partners have joined with Cloud DX, including Medtronic, Canada and that partnership gives us tremendous reach and additional distribution horsepower to really grow quickly in the next 12 to 18 months.
SH: For company shareholders and potential investors, what kind of future development and progress can we expect with your Connected Health, Remote Patient Monitoring, and Self-Monitoring platforms?
RK: I want to focus on sort of three points here, Dave. The first point is of course, with these giant partnerships, you're going to see additional contracts coming on board, both large contracts with large healthcare providers and also smaller contracts underneath the master deployment contracts with Medtronic, Equitable life and other giant multi-billion-dollar corporations like that, that we might be doing business with. So a lot of contract growth, you're going to see a lot of growth in patient onboarding. So once we've signed a contract, the next step for us is to onboard those patients, which is how we build that recurring revenue business and so we'll be reporting to the market in the coming quarters, on our metrics and on our ability to onboard those patients as we get closer and closer to becoming EBITDA positive because that's the road we're on right now and the third point I want to make is that additional non dilutive funding is almost certainly in the pipeline. Cloud DX has been the recipients of millions of dollars in non dilutive funding, which really benefits investors because it helps pay for R&D without having to dilute our investors. So announcements in that area are something else that we can really look forward to.
SH: What really separates Cloud DX from the competition and makes your business model unique?
RK: Well, first of all, Dave, we are one of the most innovative companies in North America. The awards you mentioned, the awards we've earned for innovation are only part of it but we have a very strong and innovative program that delivers new types of medical devices, new types of virtual care features and that's the reason giant companies like Medtronic Canada chose to partner with us. So we are absolute leaders in innovation and you're going to continue to see us leading from the front, a new software and new hardware to improve care. That's the first thing, the second thing is astonishing customer service and satisfaction. We've recently announced two completely separate third party surveys that were done recently in Canada that show each show over 95% customer satisfaction, patient satisfaction using Cloud DX, connected health. That's remarkable to have over 95% patient satisfaction on multiple announced surveys means our patients and customers absolutely love us. That's a key differentiator and the third differentiator is our partnerships.
We've mentioned equitable life, which is a unique brand-new partnership. We're very excited about as a model for other partnerships like that in other markets in the United States, our Medtronic Canada partnership means we intend to touch almost every patient Medtronic does business with across Canada up to potentially as many as a million patients one day. Those partnerships also position us for global expansion because as we succeed with giant companies in Canada, they can then take us around the world.
SH: I have to mention your stock has had a very nice bump since mid-December…increasing by more than 50% in value since then. What can you tell our investor audience regarding the current valuation of your stock and why you think it’s still a good buy right now?
RK: When you look at the impact of the announcements we've made, even since December, the implications of these announcements are staggering and so we believe that notwithstanding that nice increase in our share price, we're still dramatically undervalued compared to the work that we've accomplished, the partnerships that are in place and the growth that's about to happen. Virtual care is here to stay. We all know that virtual care is the future and Cloud DX is just getting started.
SH: What’s the long-term strategy for the company moving forward and what should retail and institutional investors be looking out for?
RK: Well, one of the things that we're very proud of and as we've spoken many times here even today, is that we are the chosen partner of some of the largest companies in the world. Another partner we have haven't even mentioned is Air Liquide, which is the largest oxygen company in the world in Canada, under vital air Canada. They use Cloud DX connected health for oxygen patients at home. So these large partnerships and our own additional growth without the partnerships across the Canadian landscape and all across the United States so far really mean that the scope for growth here is tremendous. As we onboard the patients we've been discussing, we get to the point where within about a 10,000 patients on our system, we expect to be somewhere near EBITDA positive but just the implications of that are even better because if we get to a hundred thousand patients on our system, out of millions and millions of potential patients, millions of patients we already have under contract Steve at that point, we're in $90 million a year business approximately, that implies a share price many times what we're currently looking at. So we believe that the upside potential of Cloud DX has barely been touched so far.
SH: Can you tell our audience a little bit about your corporate management and board teams, along with the experience and innovative ideas they bring to the digital and virtual healthcare space?
RK: Well, we've already discussed innovation and the awards that we've earned for innovation, our R&D team is absolutely staggering in their ability to innovate, to file patent applications. We have a strong patent portfolio, so I couldn't be more proud of our R&D efforts but our operations team and our service team and our support team are absolutely second to none as well. We're still relatively small. We have 58 employees at Cloud DX and yet we are able to work with and service some of the largest companies in the world and we're growing very quickly at some of the largest hospital systems and entire provinces for that matter in North America. So the Cloud DX team is extraordinary.
I also want to give a shout out to our board of directors. Our board includes two physicians and the physician groups that we've worked with have been instrumental in our success, not only as customers and as cheerleaders but also as investors Cloud DX raised almost all of its private capital prior to going public from the medical community. So our lead investor as well Brad Miller has been a tremendous support. William Charnetski on our board has been a tremendous mentor to me. Our former Chief Financial Officer is a board member, Michele Middlemore. So the board is United and a very experience both as entrepreneurs, as businesspeople, and even with credentials from the ICD Rotman course at that business school. So we have the team we need.
SH: And finally, Robert, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked please feel free to elaborate.
RK: Thank you. I do want to make just a couple more quick points here and really it is this, as we've already discussed, virtual care is just at its infancy. We all sort of only began to appreciate virtual care during the pandemic during 2020 and 2021. The ways that virtual care will be deployed in the future are still being determined by our customers and by our partners and companies like Cloud DX. So that potential scope for growth is absolutely incredible. We're positioned as not only an innovation leader as an intellectual property leader, as a customer service leader but as the best possible partner for those forward-looking companies. So we want investors to know that as an investment Cloud DX’s future proof, we're de-risk with these wonderful partnerships and supporting us and growing with us is potentially a great investment.
For more information, visit
www.clouddx.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.