Startups on Sunday
A few fab companies on the lookout for funds and friends
Oh hey friend,
Happy Sunday! There’s A LOT of people raising right now, and plenty of new funds, syndicates, and even PE firms getting into the healthtech game. So it really is a darn exciting time.
As promised, here’s a few companies to check out on the circuit and keen to connect…
If you want to know more - let them know or flick me a note for an intro.
*Disclaimer* - This is by no means investment advice, endorsement or a recommendation. I am just sharing some of the companies and peeps out there with the information they provided with no assurance of accuracy or completeness and should not be used for any purposes. This is not intended as public capital raising. Always do your own research and reach out directly to the companies.
🍼Milkdrop
Founder/Contact: Alexandra Sinickas
What problem do you solve, for who, and how?
For every 10 women who use breast pumps, 7 have nipple pain or discomfort and 8 feel like a cow. We are redesigning the breast pump from the nipple up.
Any extra context, copy, progress etc
We launched our first product in April, a soft silicone cushion that stretches over existing breast pumps making them more comfortable. We want to start exporting that to the US.
We're working on our second product, a wearable breast pump that fits inside your bra, which is soft, elegant and through a novel compression mechanism, we expect to collect more milk. It's a working prototype, which we want to progress to pilot for release in 2023.
🦴 OrthoDx
Founder/Contact: Antony Rapisarda
What problem do you solve, for who, and how?
We are a molecular diagnostics company that specializes in the differentiation between infective and non-infective causes of joint pain.
Any extra context, copy, progress etc
We are preparing for our large randomized control trial across Australia to demonstrate the real time benefits of our technology to both patients and the healthcare system.
📱Maslow
Founder/Contact: Andrew Akib
What problem do you solve, for who, and how?
We make it easy for people with disabilities to remotely access therapy programs and independently manage their care from home
Any extra context, copy, progress etc
Maslow is a mobile application that puts people with a disability back at the centre of their care and rehab. users can:
Remotely access guided care and therapy programs from all their therapists
Create care routines and share them with their entire support work team
Communicate with their entire team in one place
We launched in March 2020 in response to COVID, to help our community remotely reconnect with their therapists. We've since had over 1500 users, support workers, and therapists sign up, 150+ rehab and care organisations sign up, closed 2 paid partnerships with rehab clinics, and have had 75+ of our users and their teams pay for an annual subscription upfront.
We are raising an angel round of $200K to build capability to address our waiting list of 1500 users, and 150+ organisations interested in using Maslow.
Our target investors are individual angels and founders (not institutions) with experience investing in and scaling companies in the Australian digital health space.
🤖 Gheorg
Founder/Contact: Dr Louise Metcalf
What problem do you solve, for who, and how?
We are solving better access to mental health services for now nearly a billion children with anxiety, at least more than two-thirds of whom fail to get mental health help due the lack of practitioners all around the world.
Unfortunately it is literally impossible to create enough human practitioners to meet the avalanche of mental health issues that are here now, let alone the ones that are coming due to climate change and other variables such as social media.
Any extra context, copy, progress etc
Gheorg is similar to the adult-targeted Woebot that just raised 90M B round though has no paying subscribers and has not started to solve that problem. Gheorg is co-created with children and has mentally healthy gamification that interests children to return to use him daily. Our vision is to make Gheorg the one thing you definitely don't want to do without if your child needs help with psychological issues, or even difficult life circumstances, such as divorce or bullying.
Gheorg is also on a mission to solve childhood self harm and suicide. We currently have 3000 downloads and 500 active users, we have an 80% retention rate after 4 weeks. Our marketing CPC is a third of the industry benchmark. Our go-to market is through teachers, psychologists and children's hospitals where, for now, we give Gheorg away for free, but will eventually charge. We are also building a data portal so that pharmaceutical companies can use this data to improve medications for children. Our business model is B2C for now, where parents pay a monthly subscription fee, we are currently testing our subscription plans and we have some initial subscribers. We are partnered with the CSIRO to access AI talent for our AI meta build. Gheorg is currently used in developing countries such as Myanmar, as well as in the US and the UK and Australia. We have secured a commitment of overseas investment for our scale up, however, we want to secure Angel investors in Australia.
💉Mobius
Founder/Contact: Zachary King
What problem do you solve, for who, and how?
Mobius is a communication platform for clinicians. We use automation and AI to improve the patient feedback loop. Our first product Guided Injection
Patient Tracker (GIPT) tracks patient pain levels post-procedure to deliver critical clinical data in real time helping clinicians to systematically identify patients who need follow up treatment. is built specifically for radiologists and enables them to systematically identify a cohort of previously undiagnosed patients who require follow up treatment
Any extra context, copy, progress etc
So far we have:
Built and launched MVP
Run 3 months of beta testing in a live clinical environment with very positive results (99% patient response rate, 12x ROI, 4x patient return rate)
A 3 month paid pilot study will kick off this month (pending procurement approval) in a number of clinics
💻 Pliny
Founder/Contact: James Manners
What problem do you solve, for who, and how?
We are improving clinical productivity for Cardiologists, Ophthalmologists & Optometrists by providing a platform to view all of a patients' diagnostic scans in one place.
Any extra context, copy, progress etc
With a single click of a button, clinicians can view all of a patients' scans. Our cloud platform seamlessly stores all scans, no matter their size, reducing IT costs and allowing clinicians to focus on their patients, not their computers. Pliny Post also allows secure real-time collaboration on digital scans. We are early revenue with over 80k patients, 800k images and 4.5TB of data in our cloud. 70% of our users said that Pliny makes their clinical practice more efficient.
💊 Clinials
Founder/Contact: Maree Beare
What problem do you solve, for who, and how?
Clinials is an advanced Clinical Trial recruitment platform seeking to help Pharmaceutical companies bring medicines to market sooner.
Any extra context, copy, progress etc
80% of clinical trials are unable to find suitable people, so these lifesaving treatments are never developed nor launched. An $11 Billion market where recruitment is 40% of expenditure. Clinials Pre-Seed raise of $300K is open to enable fast-tracking of onboarding for the 3 clients in pipeline.
🦷 Ooompf Aligners
Founder/Contact: Faisal Barafi
What problem do you solve, for who, and how?
There are 485 million people in the world who need a more affordable, ethical & convenient teeth straightening option.
The current market has;
Ethical supervised treatment with the dentist, which costs a lot of money and time.
Cheaper unsupervised alternatives with no dentist oversight, which compromises quality and care.
Straight teeth is a privilege not everyone has access to - Ooompf is levelling the playing field. At Ooompf we have digitised our customer experience using teledentistry & e-commerce to enhance convenience & affordability, without compromising quality.
Any extra context, copy, progress etc
We do this by combining the ease & appeal of telehealth with the responsibility of dentist-led clear aligner treatment. To get started, you simply visit your closest Ooompf dentist for a check-up, X-Rays and 3D scan of your mouth. You directly pay us just $2,699, we ship all your aligners to your home and virtually monitor your progress every 10 days using a remote monitoring app. You only see the dentist again if you need to. Our aligners are manufactured in-house in Sydney & we’re vertically integrated and own our customer relationship. We see ourselves as B2B2C. This allows us to scale rapidly through D2C, and bring in recurring revenue by tapping into our B2B network of dentists.
Cool cool…
If you’re raising, want to be featured or just to have a chat - give me a shout.
Roundup coming soon
👋 Emily