Maple

Maple started in 2015 in Brett Belchetz's dining room. He was an emergency room doctor watching patients wait eight hours for four minutes of transactional care, and he brought in two friends — Stuart Starr as CTO and Roxana Zaman for the product and business side — because he had no technology or company-building background himself. The first doctors on the platform were his own ER colleagues, brought on as co-owners so the network would stay staffed in the early days when there were no patients. By the April 2018 TechTO talk Maple had over 150 practitioners available around the clock, coast to coast, resolving 91% of visits on the platform. Because Canadian provinces largely do not fund virtual care, Maple is paid for by patients directly, by employers through benefit plans, and by provincial governments under contracts Belchetz said in 2018 he was not permitted to talk about. That funding model has drawn steady public criticism, which he answers with a taxi analogy: you pay to save the hours, not because walking isn't free. Shoppers Drug Mart invested $75M CAD in late 2020 alongside a deal to provide virtual care. Maple explored a $100M TSX IPO in 2021 and did not file. In November 2025 it acquired Beyond ADHD.