Best Practice leads $3.9M raise for Australian clinical AI startup Medcast
What's the deal? Best Practice SoftwareDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has led a US$3.49M (roughly $3.9 million) capital raise for MedcastDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, an Australian company building AI-powered clinical knowledge tools for clinicians. The round was announced on September 21, 2026.
Who's involved? Best Practice is Australia's largest provider of clinical and practice management software and is 49% owned by the $9.7 billion Sonic HealthcareDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. Medcast, founded and led by Dr Stephen Barnett, delivers clinical education, continuing professional development programs, and governed clinical guidance.
What's the money for? The investment will expand MedLumaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Medcast's AI-enabled clinical knowledge platform. It provides evidence-based answers grounded in Australian guidelines, with transparent citations back to source material.
The funds will scale Medcast's technology and clinical teams, and deepen integrations with clinical software.
What's the endgame? The two firms want to embed trusted clinical guidance into clinicians' existing workflows at scale. MedLuma is designed to help clinicians navigate a growing volume of medical information and access relevant evidence at the point of care.
Medcast works directly with copyright holders so publishers retain ownership of their intellectual property and are credited within the platform.
What they're saying: "AI has enormous potential to support clinicians by bringing trusted knowledge into the workflow, but it will always complement — not replace — the clinical judgment, experience and patient-centred decision-making that define high-quality care," said Best Practice chief executive officer Craig Hodges.
Barnett said the challenge is trust. "Clinicians need information they can trust, grounded in evidence and Australian practice. Solving this 'last mile' of medical-grade AI is the hard problem we are tackling."
The signal: The deal shows established healthcare software players betting on locally governed clinical AI, positioning tools built for a specific market's guidelines rather than generic models — with the incumbent's distribution channel as the route to scale.
Read more: medcast.com.au
Image credit: EU-Ukraine cooperation
