The three months of intense focus. The crafting of the perfect pitch. The big presentation on demo day, followed by press mentions and meetings with investors.
And…then what? What comes after the accelerator?
For the entrepreneurs of Rock Health’s Boston Class, which wrapped up in August of 2012, there have been four follow-on fundings, some pilot tests, a pivot and a few long quiet periods. I checked in with the entrepreneurs just over a year after they completed the program to see how they’re all doing now.
This fall, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Social+Capital Partnership backed NeuroTrack with a $2 million Series A. CEO Ellie Kaplan said that consequently, the company packed up and moved to Palo Alto, where it’s continued to build its team and refine its computer-based memory test for Alzheimer’s disease.
The test measures the ability of seniors to recognize familiar images that they’ve previously been shown, as a way to gauge their chance of developing Alzheimer’s. It’s been tested in an NIH-backed study, and pilots and/or research collaborations are underway at Mass General, Johns Hopkins and Stanford, Kaplan said.
NeuroTrack has made some valuable improvements to the test, like cutting down the time it takes people to complete, and plans to continue marketing it to pharmaceutical companies sponsoring clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease.
Another company that raised follow-on funding this year was Home Team Therapy. At demo day, the team pitched an at-home physical therapy program that used the Kinect game system. “Since then, we pivoted a little bit,” said Founder Tim Fu. “After interviewing patients, we found that Kinect wasn’t accessible enough for them, so we turned our attention to mobile and Internet solutions.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Having just relaunched, Home Team Therapy has two pilots underway, and the team is talking to physical therapists and insurance companies to figure out a payment model that would work best. It’s also closed in on $150,000 — about half of what Fu is hoping to raise for a seed round.
“The way we think about ourselves going forward is really a platform for patients and athletes to use as an online communication portal,” he said.
A third company, Podimetrics, which last August demoed a prototype of a sensor-embedded bath mat for early detection of diabetic foot ulcers, closed a $2.5 million Series A this spring. Co-founder Jeff Engler told me that the team has essentially been heads-down since then, working on building its products. He was mum on whether there were any big changes to what the company was developing, but said we should hear some updates within the next few months.
CEOs from fellow Rock Boston companies Reify Health and Neumitra (which reportedly raised a seed round and about $7,000 from an Indiegogo campaign last fall) both also said they were “heads down” and unable to provide an update.
Josh Spanogle, CEO of teledermatology company Novi Medicine, wrote in an email that the company has gone quiet for now, conserving resources and waiting for the market to turn around. I couldn’t get in touch with the seventh and final company from the class, RxApps.
The idea for checking in with these companies was as much about trying to shed some light on whether accelerators are producing stronger startups as it was about seeing each company’s individual progress. That’s the looming question as accelerators and incubators continue to pop up across the world.
But I wonder if there’s also value in accelerators for giving companies that eventually won’t find traction a “safe” place to fail quicker and earlier than they would on their own — since a good majority of startups won’t eventually produce returns for investors. It seems like the experience gave some of these founders a good reality check about what kind of business opportunities do or don’t exist for their ideas.
Overall, though, this group of companies seems to be a little ahead of the curve, at least in its ability to secure follow-on funding. (Being located in a top-ranked life science and venture capital hub probably helps!) A Tech Crunch analysis of companies in its CrunchBase determined that just over a quarter of startups who went through accelerator programs were able to secure outside funding within one year.
[Image credit: BigStock Photos]
