Presentation on the successes and failures of start-ups. Presentation of the Call9 as a failure case study and AcuPebble by Acurable as a success case study.

1. This project has received funding from European
Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation
Programme under Grant Agreement No 101007990.
Virtual health and Wellbeing Living Lab Infrastructure
Startup Success & Failure:
AcuPebble vs. Call9
Anthology Ventures
SUMMER SCHOOL 2023
Commercialization Bootcamp
June 6-7, Bilbao

4. 90% of startups fail…

5. Product Incompetence (Fraud)
Theranos, 2018; $1.4B raised Juicero, 2017; $120M raised

6. Failure Case Study: Call9
§ Founded 2015 (Graduate of YCombinator)
§ Problem to solve: Emergency medicine for Residents of Care Homes
§ Product: Telehealth service connecting doctors to care home nurses
(in-situ)
§ Value proposition:
Reduces costs to health system (unnecessary ER visits)
Reduces wait times for patients (advance diagnosis prior to ER)
§ Revenue Model: Subscription (Care Homes) + revenue sharing with
Insurers on savings from not going to the ER
§ Innovation: Telehealth + “value-based care” to determine price &
payment (patients rate the overall value/success of the service
rendered by the doctor and base the payment on their rating)

7. Failure Case Study: Call9
§ Money Raised: $34M
§ Founders: Timothy Peck MD, Celina Tenev (Radiology), XiaoSong Mu (CTO)
§ Employees at Shutdown:100
§ Reason for Closure: failure to raise additional funding to scale service
§ Reason for Failure: US medical industry slow to adopt telehealth; value-
based care didn’t provide enough revenue to the business
§ Postscript: Peck starts new company “Curve Health” in 2020; uses
Call9’s IP and takes advantage of new telehealth boom; raised $18M as
of February 2022…

8. Call9

9. Success Case Study: AcuPebble by Acurable
§ Founded 2016
§ Problem to solve: Effective diagnosis of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA)
§ Product: Wearable diagnostic device
§ Value proposition:
Accurate diagnosis of chronic condition based on biomarkers
Non-invasive, non-technical wearable allows for dependable home testing by
patients
§ Revenue Model: Subscription (Care Homes) + direct billing to Insurers;
§ Innovation: eliminates a bottleneck in the diagnosis process; leads to faster,
more accurate confirmation of disorder; clinicians can do multiple monitoring
with much fewer resources (no costly, complicated equipment)
§ Non-AI based

10. § Money Raised: €12.8M (1.8M = Grants; 11M = VC)
§ Founders: Esther Rodriguez-Villegas, Imperial College (UK)
§ 15 years of research underly the technology
§ Reasons for Success (so far):
• Founder experience in research + wearable tech
• Supported by Innovate UK (public-private cluster supporting product
commercialization)
• Private investors are medtech-focused and include hospital-VCs
• Device and app are consumer focused (purposely made for ease-of-use) but
dispensed and monitored by clinicians (contrast to many B2C products that give
notoriously inaccurate data)
Success Case Study: AcuPebble by Acurable

12. This project has received funding from European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 101007990.
Contact us Subscribe to our newsletter:
European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL)
https://enoll.org/
https://openlivinglabdays.com/
info@vitalise-project.eu
Project coordinator:
Dr. Evdokimos Konstantinidis
Scientific coordinator:
Prof. Panos Bamidis
Online presence
https://anthologyventures.com/
https://www.facebook.com/AnthologyVentures
https://www.instagram.com/argyriosspyridis/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/35505743/admin/
Adriane Thrash
Managing Partner, Anthology Ventures
at@anthologyventures.com