Jim Higgins

EPIC Ventures is thrilled to announce that Jim Higgins, Founder and Chairman of SolutionReach is joining EPIC as an Entrepreneur in Residence. Jim’s long and fruitful partnership with EPIC’s Managing Partners, Nick Efstratis and Kent Madsen, began through their mutual association with tech giant Ancestry.com. Jim was an executive with Ancestry.com, guiding the company to early success and EPIC (fka Wasatch Ventures) was an investor in the company’s first institutional round. Jim was easily recognizable in those early days as a potential future founder.

Through his Ancestry.com experience, a vision materialized for Jim where he saw the need for customer relationship management (CRM) delivered across multiple modalities, including mobile. He founded Communitect in 2000 with EPIC on board as a seed investor to realize this vision, beginning his journey as a successful entrepreneur. As is often the case in start-up tech land external forces (the Dotcom implosion) swept in and the technology market crashed. Not to be dissuaded Jim continued to build on his vision and pioneered SMS patient communication in the dental market to solve the all too common and costly problem of patient no-shows. SmileReminder, as the company was known, was born from Jim’s vision and diligence, becoming the touchstone market leader in doctor / patient communications. SmileReminder had a successful exit, being acquired by Summit Partners and delivering nearly a 20x return on investment for the Fund. The company has now moved into multiple medical markets, and SmileReminder is now recognized nationally as SolutionReach. Today, SolutionReach serves over 80 million patients.

We look forward to our continued partnership with Jim, as we focus on our mutual mission to build and operate another successful, pioneering and disruptive company. We will benefit greatly from Jim’s continued role as trusted advisor and board member to our portfolio and strong mentor of young founders. We are also grateful to up our cool factor by adding a former professional tennis player to the mix!