Our feature technology company this month is Scanadu, which is a remarkable technology for improving our health.
Mindfull Healthcare
One of the greatest impact areas in our life is the area of health, a key focus at Mindfull Ventures. Our investments include everything from devices, wearables, new technologies, and innovative solutions that provide the preventative or curative solutions for our health and well being.
Preventative health care includes solutions ranging from healthy diet and exercise to stress reduction and healthy lifestyle choices. Curative healthcare includes everything from biotechnology and genomics to specific therapies that detect and treat chronic diseases like cancer, congestive heart failure, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.
Mindfull Teams Up With Scanadu
Walter de Brouwer, creator of Scanadu
Our first featured health tech company is Scanadu.
The majority of all of our companies come to us through a personal connection and personal relationship. When Scanadu was first coming out with their innovative health care devices in 2011, I remember reading about them and being excited by their vision and mission. Two and a half years later, one of my good friends and advisors to our fund, Dr. Alan Greene and I sat down for lunch and he told me he was chief medical officer for this ground breaking health diagnostic company Scanadu. What a small world it is!
The next day, Dr. Greene introduced me to Scandu’s founder, Walter de Brouwer. In my first meeting with Walter, we shared a deep connection and talked about Scanadu being a perfect fit for our fund, Mindfull Investors. Being an innovative, breakthrough, disruptive technology that would positively impact people’s health, reducing healthcare costs and enabling an individual to track and monitor their heart’s vital signs was of keen interest to us.
Walter’s personal story is rather dramatic and emotional, and is the mission and purpose behind creating Scanadu.
Walter’s son, Nelson, was at Disneyland and seeing Spiderman do his super human feats, he too thought that he could fly. He jumped out of a window and lucky to be alive, spent a year of critical care in the hospital. He went from being in a coma to having significant brain trauma and being paralyzed. Walter and his wife, Sam, spent the year caring for him, living in the hospital 24/7.
When Walter was there, he saw that Doctors came in every few hours and took his son’s vital signs. They took his temperature and his blood pressure and heart rate many times each day. Walter saw that the thermometer was a very simple, elegant device that they used quite effectively. But to detect what was going on in his son’s heart, wasn’t so simple. Having to be woken up to put on an arm cuff to record his blood pressure seemed archaic and inefficient. Bingo! Scanadu was born to solve this problem.
That was the catalyst for Walter to recognize there must be a better way to record your heart’s vital signs. That’s how he came up with the first Scanadu product called Scout. The elegant, handheld device when held up to your forehead for 10 seconds, records your blood pressure, temperature and heart rate and downloads it to your smart phone.
Scanadu Scout Raised $1.6 Million Dollars in 45 days
Even though Walter is a mature and seasoned entrepreneur, he has the energy and the optimistic mindset of a 25-year-old entrepreneur today with what I call, fearless optimism. Walter had a brilliant idea to use Crowdfunding as an innovative way to raise funds and to accelerate their pathway to getting FDA approval for their product.
He did so by launching a crowdfunding campaign with Indiegogo to allow donors to support Scanadu’s efforts in bringing their first product to market. They generated the most successful campaign on Indiegogo to date, raising over a million and a half dollars from 9,000 donors that will be the first beta users of their product in April of this year.
This was a brilliant idea to be able to accelerate their connection with their customer and to validate the effectiveness of their product while raising capital, and building their future customer base.
Walter and his team are very forward thinking. They already have two more products that are far along in development. One is a hand held device that will detect what’s happening in your kidney, in your urinary track, and can detect, monitor and track your pregnancy. Stay tuned for more details about Scanadu’s future ground breaking, life enhancing products coming to enhance our lives.
Learn More About Scanadu
We are excited to continue sharing Scanadu’s progress and updates with our friends in the Mindfull community. Scanadu is one of the leading companies in the final running for the $10 million “tri-corder “X prize, so there will be lots of news coming from the tech community about their extraordinary advancements and the products Scanadu will be bringing to market.
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