Peter Verburg is founder and CEO of Numi Health, a mobile medical services company that is disrupting the way healthcare is delivered in Calgary, Edmonton and beyond – from COVID-19 testing to general wellness screening and more.
He has a storied background, having co-founded and directed public and private companies in pharmaceuticals, healthcare, energy & tourism. His interest in entrepreneurship started with small ventures as a side hobby, including a medical training company, an import-export company and a landscaping business.
While working on his MBA to complement his Philosophy degree, Peter was recruited at 35 by Canada’s top investment banker and received training in corporate finance while running multiple deals simultaneously for three years. Tired of the IB culture and wanting to get more involved in new company creation as an owner, Peter accepted an offer from one of the country’s most successful energy entrepreneurs to form a venture capital shop. Their first fundraiser kicked off just as the 2008 financial crisis hit. Plans to raise a big fund were dashed, so they closed on a small friends & family fund and used the capital to seed two energy companies. Peter serves as a director at both and an executive involved in running deals in one of them. Prior to the energy crash of 2014, they had a combined EV of around $1 B. Both survived the crash and are solid companies today.
Burned out by the crash, Peter some time off in 2016/17, travelled to South America. He came back with three ideas for new companies: an app to facilitate bike tours; a licensed medical cannabis company in Colombia; and a mobile medical company offering private-pay services via an app – hence, Numi Health was born. Numi kicked into high gear when it was obvious that COVID would be the mechanism to create the market. Peter was living in Madrid in early 2020 and spent the first lockdown there huddled in an apartment working on the platform. He brought together the Numi team through the summer, returning to Canada and launching Numi in October 2020.
Peter also has a background as a journalist. He was western bureau chief, investment editor and columnist at Canadian Business, where he reported extensively on Canadian companies with operations abroad. He is also passionate about philanthropy and volunteering – he helped launch the Veteran’s Transition Network nationally, was also a volunteer on the Distress Centre suicide help line, and a director of Wordfest. When he’s not launching companies, Peter is cyclist, yogi and foodie.
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