speaker-0 (00:05.646)
Welcome to the Hard Tech Podcast.

Well, everybody welcome back to the hard tech podcast. I'm your host Deandre Hericus with my usual suspect, Grant Chapman, CEO of Glassport, a hard tech product development firm located here in Indianapolis. And today we have a super exciting guest in Charlene Jerome from Sensoria health. Welcome to the show.

Hey everybody.

speaker-2 (00:27.67)
Well, thank you, DeAndre. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here today. As you said, yes, I am Charlene Jerome. I'm actually the marketing manager for Sensoria Health. I've been with the company now for about nine years. So I've seen all kinds of things, all kinds of growth and everything that I want to tell you about how we started and where we are and how we got here today.

That's awesome. Yeah, for the listeners just not tuning in and they don't know, they're unfamiliar with the product or the space that you guys are in, if you could just give us a brief overview to kick off the show here.

Sure, absolutely. So we are leading developers of remote patient monitoring wearables and artificial intelligence software solutions that help improve people and patients' lives. And we do this because we have created kind of a stack. So what we've done is we have our own proprietary textile pressure sensors. We have a piece of microelectronics that IE is our platform that makes things smart, customized mobile applications. And we also have a Azure HIPAA compliant, Microsoft Azure HIPAA compliant cloud.

infrastructure as well. So we kind of do it all.

No, that's awesome. And again, it's one of those one of those stores where you guys really do understand how hard it is all the way from the top to bottom to get raw data. You guys build a sensor that is part of the IP that you guys have. Then you have to build your own, you know, IoT gateway, the battery powered system and microelectronics that make that sensor work and report its data up to the cloud. And then you guys are working so far up the stack that you're working on the HIPAA compliant cloud side, which is no small feat with today's security requirements.

speaker-2 (01:57.006)
True, very, true. And just to give you a little bit of context as well. So my co-founders are both from Microsoft background. My CEO Davide was actually in charge of the healthcare solutions group and he was in charge of marketing and product strategy for the Amelda and Health Vault product lines. So he's always had a passion for healthcare and they're originally from Italy. So Davide Vigano and Maurizio Meccano. Maurizio is our CTO and he was an Xbox Live program manager. So we have the...

tech-savvy-ness and then we also have the business-savvy-ness and it makes it makes for a great team.

Awesome, no, that's great. It's really cool where you can get people from different parts of the Microsoft organization that feels like one family, but they do completely different things, right? When you hit that level of enterprise, you've got both sides of the equation all in one roof. They just might not know each other exists until they're put in the same room at the same time.

Absolutely. was actually, that's a good point. That was actually one of our original challenges because we have a multidisciplinary engineering team. So you have Garmin engineers, but then you also have, you know, electro engineers, but then you also have, you know, signal processing capabilities and they all kind of, they speak the same language, sort of, but they all spoke it in just a little bit of a different dialect. So was getting this whole team to be able to, you know, comfortably communicate and understand what everyone brings to the table.

was a challenge, we obviously overcame it and we're a very, very strong team today. Excuse me.

speaker-0 (03:24.366)
That's that's great. That's awesome We always you know joke about that at glassboard that one of the reasons that we think it's so powerful to do engineering in one physical location is you can lock all the engineers in a room and Drop as many knives in the table minus one as there are people and whoever comes out alive has got it figured out You know from the problem-solving because in you know in the world of physical tech that has data that gets recorded and reported There are more than one place in the chain to fix the problem. You can have better sensors that

produce cleaner singles or more accurate data right out of the sensor. You can have better single processing as you said, digital single process engineers to filter that data, make sense of it, understand what it means. Then you can have really creative firmware engineers that are doing averaging and more numerical calculations. And then you need really good data scientists on the backend to present that data to the user in actionable ways. And you can fix a lot of problems anywhere in the stack.

but depending on where you choose to fix it, it may be easier or harder. And getting everyone in the room to agree, this is the most efficient isn't always easy.

Great point.

And Charlene, as we were jumping into this episode, think that pivots are always really interesting. In the world of software, think some of the most legendary pivots were, speaking like gaming, Slack originally was a gaming company. And all of a sudden, they realized they needed a better platform to communicate on. And boom, now you have Slack. that's historically one of the best top pivots, most legendary pivots of all time, at least in the world of software. But in the world of hardware, you guys have also had a very, what seems like an interesting pivot or evolution from

speaker-1 (04:57.208)
Performance socks all the way to a full full-scale health care platform. So curious on that journey as well

Yeah, absolutely. So again, speaking to David A. Max passion for health care. So we always knew that we wanted to get to this point. However, we knew that we also needed to, you know, prove our proof of concept. Right. So what they said was, can we inject proprietary textile pressure sensors and couple that with a piece of microelectronics and I make the garment smart. And so

they're crazy enough that they couldn't find the sensor in the marketplace that met all their qualifications. So think about washability, think about durability, think about usability. So they were crazy enough to create their own proprietary textile pressure sensors, which I can actually show you here today. this is a Smartsock version two, and this has textile pressure sensors in the first and the fifth metatarsal and at the calcaneus. And then here's the little piece of

Device again, it's a nine axis IMU, which means it has an accelerometer a gyroscope and a magnetometer Davide likes to say as in real life the male the female component tells the male component what to do So this is the female telling the male that we need to put it on and then and then we're charged So so they did that so their vision has always been the garment is the computer So basically, you know, we all get up we we take showers, you know, we well

we put on our clothes. Why do we need extraneous, you know, things to tell us things about our body? Why can't our garment just be that ultra personal computer? And so, so that's how we started out running. We did that to again, prove that we could do it as well as reduce injury and improve performance. So that's what, so that's what we did. That was version one did not have the sensory cord. This is actually version two. That's when they're because they're

speaker-2 (06:47.586)
they're Microsoft, so they're platform builders, right? So they don't want to just solve one problem and create one product. They want to be able to reuse multiple components, which we have done with the Sensoria Core, now as the platform. So you'll see it in different form factors for all of our healthcare products. But in 2019, we made the choice to incorporate a second company, Sensoria Health. And that's been the main focus thus far. We still, obviously, still have the running socks for runners.

But we also have them, being used in gait analysis, they're being used in neurological diseases like Parkinson's, MS, multiple sclerosis. So it's really quite, it's quite impactful and powerful. I just, I get chills just talking about it sometimes, all the things that this company has been able to do and I'm so happy to be a part of it.

No, that's awesome. It's one of those stories that sounds like you guys invented a hammer and now everything looks like a nail, right? And we experience that with tools we buy in engineering that like how did we survive before we had this tool that tells us it's critical data to help us make better choices and that's what you guys are providing clinicians and practitioners and doctors is better data and it sounds like your core story really started from the crawl walk run approach. Yep. We're gonna build a smart sock. It's gonna tell us about pressure and then we're gonna add on IMUs

It's going to attract more than just pressure, but have one core platform as a hardware platform to collect that data and ship it to the cloud. Likely over Bluetooth, is that your communication protocol? Yep. So your low power can transmit lots of data. And then you've realized that, I can use that core, that IoT core on anything. But this pressure sensing hammer or technology can hit all these different nails. It's good for runners. I love MS Parkinson's Gain Analysis. I mean, we're working on some.

It is, yes.

speaker-0 (08:34.318)
really neat stuff in gate analysis, not on the pressure side, but a different sensing methodology and combining the two would be wildly neat to see. And I think that's the fun part about being where we are in the, I joke, the pointy end of the spear in hardware. People like us and you guys get to invent that new method of getting data. And then we get to go see how we've enabled healthcare providers to weaponize it as we joke. You know, how much cool stuff can you figure out with this data set that we just can now record and beforehand.

You were counting ceiling tiles to count how many steps that someone had taken a day. So, know, as now when you had that first product built that is just for running, did you guys intentionally, was that a wellness device or do you guys go right into medical device out of the gate? Was that the first product FDA regulated or did you get out in the market in wellness, collect enough data to then prove that now we can collect data for a healthcare application?

Yes, that's correct. We started out as a general wellness device. The SOX are actually still considered general wellness devices. Some of our other products are our FDA cleared class one products. So like our diabetic foot boot that I can talk about as well as, yeah, we can start there, but.

I think that's such a good story for everyone listening to podcast to hear that it is totally okay to start a wellness device if you're going to become a medical device company. And it's that building block of data set that can get you the proof you need to go through the FDA process with confidence. Right? Like we know what our accuracy is and what our data is. We have lots of users and have probably learned something from the very first version we launched to the version we're now applying for FDA clearance on. And that's super cool. And so from that narrative,

You know, good?

speaker-2 (10:15.406)
So I was going to say, so there's also the clinical validation piece. we're a technology company, but we're not the clinical validation piece. So what makes us so great is that we partner with some of the leading academic institutions and research institutions across the board. So for example, we have done like R01, those are very large grants with USC, Keck School of Medicine, the leading podiatrist ever, Dr. David Armstrong.

Also Bijan Nujafia, BCLA, probably the second in the podiatry field. We work with Brad Willingham at Shepherd Center in Atlanta. He's validating our socks in MS, currently. So yes, so we rely on the experts in that side of the realm to be able to say, your socks are authentically validated and then we can move to the next step, which helps it, of course, in that FDA process.

So there has been independent research that has been published on our smart socks, saying that they compare either on par or more favorably than traditional gait labs, which you would see in conditions offices that cost thousands upon thousands of dollars. And our smart socks are 398 for both both instrumented socks. So that's a fraction of the cost. And you're getting the same data or better quality data. And again, independent study was purchased by the University of Sherbrooke in Canada. That was Patrick Boissy.

I'm happy to share these studies with you as well.

That's great and I think it's it's really that's doubling down in the concept of the platform that you guys built You have researchers that are wanting to partner with your technology because you make a great research platform Which means you're probably going to make a great you know user platform for collecting data for clinicians and doctors in the field trying to get More data on their patients so they can make better choices Coach them through different therapy or see their progression and this is a the part of the IOT of medicine I've really enjoyed in the last five or eight years that

speaker-0 (12:11.042)
You know, from 2012 to 2020, everything in your house got smart. Your toaster, your thermostat, your doorknob, that all got smart. It all started collecting data. And a place where we had such a lack of data was in healthcare. You know, how often do we get to talk to our primary care physicians or even the specialists if we have something going on? But these remote patient monitoring products allow great detailed data to be tracked over time.

and trends are always more powerful than one measurement. I think that's what you guys have definitely shown in some of your devices.

Yeah, and speaking on the data as well, there was always data when you were at the appointment, but it was the data that whenever you were in between appointments that was sometimes missing. I feel like is that something that an area that you guys have focused on?

Yeah, so we are extending the reach of the clinician. We don't want to replace the clinician any way, or form, but we're also looking into agentic AI tools. So because of this remote patient monitoring platform that we have, yes, you can see the data and you can also, because of the clinician dashboard that we've created, we have, it's color coded. So the guys in green, so it's like a traffic light approach, right? So the guys in green are doing what they need to be doing from an activity level and adherence level, et cetera. The yellow ones are sometimes in and out of ranges of normality.

And then the red ones are where the clinicians really need to be deployed because for whatever reason they're either not wearing their diabetic foot boot, for example, or they're not taking enough steps or they're not adhering to the offloading protocol, which is crucial for diabetic foot ulcers. So we again are just extending that reach. And then again, the clinician dashboard helps to be able to make better use of the clinician's time. We're at a shortage.

speaker-2 (13:49.55)
Since the pandemic, like thousands of people left for physical therapy jobs. So we're at a crisis. And so we need to be able to enable these tools. Sorry, when I speak about agentic AI. So there's a time where can the tool talk to the person and then when the tool is not able to do any more, that's when it gets directed to a human being. But that way we can take out some of the, you know, kind of like the work, right? Like all the paperwork, all the everything that nobody wants to do. And now it's done for them.

and they can get reimbursed with the new CPT codes that came out a couple years ago. So there are four different remote patient monitoring codes. And so they're able to get payment for those for doing their job, essentially. So it's for the device itself, it's for the setup of the device, and then it's for 20 minutes of monitoring per patient per month. And then if needed, an additional 20 minutes per patient per month.

And then in the case of the Smart Boot, also has MIPS incentives. So merit increased based systems where they could be penalized for not doing their job. So there's incentives across the board. It's all about value-based medicine and personalized care. And that's what we're trying to do in trying to help extend that reach.

No, and I think that's I'm so glad you brought up that remote patient monitoring billing codes, because I've mentioned them on other podcasts here in the past. And they're so powerful that these remote patient monitoring codes really provide broad coverage for monitoring patient remotely, whether it's gait or blood pressure, temperature, you know, you name it metric. And it allows early IOT medical companies to get off the ground because it's a clear set of codes to bill against to begin with. And that can cover and help get revenue in the door for you and your

I call it your distribution network, which are your clinicians, right? You guys make a product, your clinicians have patients buy it, but you need the clinicians and incentivize along the way. And those remote patient monitoring codes help them do that. And that builds this momentum for a new medical device company to get out there, build clinician relationships and get data. Because the moment you have enough data that you are affecting care, you're affecting outcomes. You can go for your own codes if you have something so novel, right? And it really helps bridge that gap where beforehand it was no

speaker-0 (16:03.596)
you gotta be self-funded all the way to the end. But now there's some, you know, crawl, walk, run, approach on both the payer side as well as what you guys can deploy in hard tech, which I think is very neat.

Yeah. And again, no data is data, right? But now we have access to data, helps us make informed clinical decisions, helps the provider make informed clinical decisions, right? So that's game changing, if you ask me. but yeah.

No, for sure. back to the agentic comments, right? Clay is over that. just got excited about CPT codes because I'm a nerd. the agentic AI side I love because it doesn't make the doctor have to check every day, right? The doctor doesn't have enough time to honestly review everyone's dashboard every day. And if that agentic AI can detect, we're missing a goal. We don't have enough activity or, man, I see something's wrong with the gate. They're favoring one foot over the other to, you know, out of bounds degrees. Hey user.

Are you aware that you're missing these goals or that you're favoring a foot? You might change this. Just do that soft, subtle coaching. We always joke the duo lingo owl from the language app that yells at you for not learning your language. I like that approach because that's the soft approach that you can have the app start first, but then you guys can have that agentic AI call home back to the clinician and make, hey, know, patient A really needs a phone call tomorrow to make sure they're okay, because they're evidently not walking enough. Are they in pain? Are they being lazy? Do we need to solve a new problem? And think that's so great to get in front of that instead of, as Deandre mentioned,

in the next appointment that might be weeks away.

speaker-2 (17:31.244)
Right, exactly. we want to see, we to be able to, again, we all know that we perform differently in the clinic than we do at home, just the same way as, you know, we say that we eat less than what we do and we exercise more than what we do, we don't. you know, but when you're there and you have to step on the scale, then the doctor's like, really? Hmm, that's all you ate, you know, that kind of analogy. Same thing here. So wouldn't it be like what you were saying, but wouldn't it be great if we said, hey, DeAndre,

you're about to fall, sit down now. Like how cool would that be? Like that's going to step further and we're working on that. We can do fall detection, but we have to train, what I was going to say was you have to train the algorithms, right? So we need the data to train the algorithms to be able to provide the predictive analytics that we really wanted, want to do.

I love that circular problem. have the same circular problem. Everyone in the space right now that is trying to blend AI, which is the new hot thing, right? Like this is the popular thing to talk about because it's really powerful. But it takes companies like yours to make the hard deck to collect enough data for the AI to go do the thing. And there's that valley of death in the middle that the hardware company has to survive long enough to get enough data to unleash the AI to make it really efficient.

Exactly.

I'm curious as well. So when it comes to the product, are you guys selling directly? it B2B or with the wellness device? Did you guys at one point go B2C? It sounds like you guys might've been B2C when it came to the wellness with the runners and of course with the medical device, probably more focused on the B2Bs. Maybe you could just unpack that a little bit on just the process to get adoption and when it comes to selling your medical device that is through B2B or what have you.

speaker-2 (19:08.716)
Yeah. So traditionally, yes, we consider ourselves more of a B2B2C company. But yes, originally we started out just B2C. Those were for the smart socks. We also have smart upper garments for heart rate and heart rate variability. Then we went to B2B2C because we use, you know, we can go through clinicians and other providers that will need to recommend that they produce this product. So yes. But you can also purchase them directly from our website. So.

So it kind of depends. also work with different companies like Defender. Defender is the person that made the boot. We made the boot smart. And so they have sales lines and they have pipelines. And so we can work together with them to create traction.

speaker-2 (19:56.238)
We used to call ourselves the Intel inside smart garments. That's so funny that you said that. Like literally it was one of our catchphrases.

That's awesome. Yeah, it's a very powerful and for everyone listening that's trying to figure out how to position their go-to-market strategy like if you can get other people to want to include your stuff in their product and they're doing the hard part of the marketing It's a whole lot easier to sell to a few businesses than to a bunch of humans And if your potential clients already are good at selling to humans, you should leverage what they're good at. Mm-hmm, right? And we've got plenty of clients I know Charlie won't mind me calling him out here at the podcast, but you know armor he makes a

polycyrene replacement that is fully compostable and works better. And he jokes he's Eno inside instead of Intel inside. Because he's just trying to make the world a better place through compostable plastics instead of ones that live forever, but also can help protect your brain or your packaging for what he's tackling. And I think that's such a strong sales strategy.

Yeah. So actually we have a couple of different revenue streams. So we can actually make our own products and we can make them smart like we did with the smart socks. We can actually offer like OEM so we can white label things, make revenue that way. We also offer an SDK. So the Sensoria Developer Kit, which allows researchers and other individuals to use our platform to build things. Either we can help them build it or they can build it on their own. So there's just lots of different revenue streams that help us make scalable.

And I wanted to mention, I forgot when you were talking about AI. So it's a buzzword now, but when we incorporated sensorius and sensor, IA means because it's artificial intelligence here, it's intelligence artificial in Italian. So that's literally what our name means. So we thought of this years ago. So we were light years ahead of, I just think my co-founders are visionaries. I mean, to be honest with you, like, and they had this vision and they made it happen.

speaker-2 (21:46.35)
which is pretty darn cool.

No, that is and it's it's great that it's you you're the the company built a platform that spans industries from both who you're targeting Industries from what you had to make from hardware to software to platform to a sales engine And again, it's it's you guys basically covered for risk with breath Which is usually the antithetical thing that you tell startups, right? Be narrow folks on the one thing you do well and it sounds like the story of you still crawl walk run We didn't try and you know tackle the world at once, but we built this holistic

platform around this first product we wanted to build the socks and use that to what I call it land and expand and use that core technology we found at every step to go do the next thing and snowball that into the platform you guys are today and I think the the question that I've got because the your what you just talked about that very unique position that you're open to partnership you can have people develop on your platform because you can make money just running the platform on the back end you know you guys don't have a you know your hardware is not your only source of revenue on the flip side you'll sell your hardware

If I had a client that wanted to introduce smart garments with pressure sensors, I'm probably now going to call you now that I know that you're cool with licensing that. So I think that's just such a cool narrative that you get to be in the market and make no enemies. You're not directly competing with anyone because another side of your business can support them.

Now that's amazing.

speaker-1 (23:05.28)
And so over the last nearly a decade, what are some of your favorite success stories you've seen come out of the impact of the product?

Well, again, I think it's just the multitude of different health care scenarios that we're tackling. Again, most of the people that we work with come to us. Like, for example, Jeff Rankin at Rancho Research Institute or Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, he works with spinal cord injury patients, and he had a mat that he was using, but it wasn't as accurate and it didn't work as well as he wanted to. had a ranch, it's a county hospital, excuse me.

So they reached out to us and they said, hey, can you make this cushion smart? And can we help spinal cord injury patients, you know, have less pressure ulcers in the buttocks area? So we did. So the same pressure sensors that are in this aug are now in like a sensorized infused insert so that it can be actually placed under their favorite cushion for real shoulder users. Or you can buy the whole cushion that we have designed as well. So which comes with like.

It's very elegant, it's Italian. So everything's really cool if it's Italian made, right? So yeah, and then we can actually, because of a custom mobile application, we can actually help remind them to do their pressure relief activities. those are things like lean right and lean left, but not just do the lean. You have to literally lean enough to create the blood flow to get that going in the area. So we can do not only how many.

times you're doing your lean, but how well you're doing your lean, right? So it's quality and quantity. Again, then we can help them to reach out to the people that need to have the most care, the quickest, because they're not following those instructions. And so we want to help those patients. The Michael J. Fox Foundation reached out to us and they said, can we do a grant with you? We want to try your smart socks for Parkinson's patients.

speaker-2 (25:06.638)
This would be a third version of the Smartsox, which has haptic motors attached to it. So what that means is they, in Parkinson's, suffer from a condition called freeze of gait. And so they literally feel like their feet are stuck to the ground. And so their brain doesn't know that their feet aren't moving. So with this haptic feedback, we can send vibrations to them to say like, move right, move left, move right, move left, because the patient population, the same like age group of patients with Parkinson's are five times more likely to fall per year, five times. So, and as you get older,

Well, when you fall, sometimes you break things. I'm one of those people. So we need to make sure that we're helping in that risk of fall area specifically. So yeah, that's pretty powerful. then now that smart socks are now being used for people with MS, I think that's incredible as well. And of course the diabetic, I mean, working with these renowned, like literally the leaders in their field, they're actually sponsoring a webinar for us. They're doing a, I was talking to Dr. Njafi.

September 3rd. So they're going to talk about the smart route and what we've been able to do for their patient population. again, it's just, it's so fun to just see like all the arms of the octopus, you know, and we still have more to go. But we're tackling, you know, like the biggest healthcare issues, either because we thought that we need to do it or somebody came to us more than likely and said, we need your help in doing this. So again, they'll take care of the clinical validation. We'll take care of the

know, the stack that I mentioned. So the sensors, the microelectronics, the mobile and the cloud.

As in this really leans into what you mentioned earlier that you guys have that SDK, the developer kit that is so key to getting adoption by people that other people that want to solve a problem, right? We see this in medical device development all the time with our clients or our clients partners that you'll have the original inventor is a practicing doctor of some kind, right? They're a nurse practitioner, a physical therapist, an MD, ED doctor, you know, emergency department doctor, and they see a problem in their field or with their patients.

speaker-0 (27:11.886)
but they're not engineers. And they went to medical school, they're gonna practice medicine and they're not gonna stop and run a company and learn engineering. But if you enable someone like that early access, especially if they're a research doctor, right? Associated with university or research hospital and you can get their interns or their students that are studying there, a quick access tool to get that doctor the data that they said in the board meeting or the staff meeting that morning.

man, wouldn't it be great if I actually knew how much weight that was going on that patient's left foot so I could see if they're limping because it hurt or because they're putting too much weight on it for whatever reason. And then the intern goes, I saw this on the internet. Let me order this and in two weeks we'll go try this out. And I think that's so powerful. And I see you laughing. I'm sure I'm describing something that happened. Your SDK got adopted and you get this cool phone call. Like, hey, we got it kind of working. Can you guys help us make this a product? And then the ball's rolling downhill.

Absolutely, 100%.

I love that and again, this is what this is one of the joys for me and hardtack is that we are always the the breakthrough moment, right? Well, it's not actually us There's the scientists and you guys tackled this with your sensor tech you built a very custom center that could survive washing and things like that as more science than engineering and then engineers get to weaponize that science for Collecting data, you know manipulate in the real world and then we just get to see the ball pick up

crazy amounts of steam downhill after we're done with it because the data scientists pick it up, the doctors pick it up, everyone finds new use cases for it. Similar to how Apple blew up software, right, with the iPhone. When they could put software in your pocket, we all started using a lot more software.

speaker-1 (28:45.646)
And so what does the future look like for the company? Maybe give people some scope of you how large the company is What's your guys, you know next six to twelve months in the future? What's the next big hill you guys are climbing?

Yeah, absolutely. So from a marketing perspective, so obviously, do, you know, anything really digital related. again, I'm, you know, helping with helping with the webinars, I am doing email outreach, I'm, I do PR press releases, again, I'm one person, one person marketing shows. So, so there's a lot of hats that all that all of us wear, it's not just me. So

But yeah, just really creating awareness. did a website refresh recently with a vendor, which we're really super happy about. think that the messaging is much more crisp and clean and it really articulates that we want to work with researchers and we want to work with clinicians and we want to work with other companies and we want to do things ourselves. Like it's just, it's so, so cool. So I'm also in charge of social media. you'll, if you connect with me on LinkedIn, you'll see a bunch of posts. Cause that works. And that's again, a very good B2B tool.

That's what I've been doing. And then I have some interns that come on board usually during the summer, and they help me with different campaigns and things like that.

No, that's great. We're our interns. had one whose last day was Friday last Friday and we've got two more whose last day is coming up next week and then two more on the 22nd and we're gonna miss them. I mean we're a team of what 21 full-time in this office and a couple other but six interns is a lot of new headcount and they are full of energy and you know as we joke piss and vinegar and they're just excited to be here and to build cool stuff and we miss them every year when they leave so I'm sure you feel the same way in the marketing department. They're bringing the fresh ideas and trying to help push the you know

speaker-0 (30:30.648)
the next generation of content and stuff.

So we've done very well so far with just a small eight, you were asking about six month, 12 month trajectory. So we've done very well with non diluted funding through grants as well as some angel investors, but we do want to do a series A round by the end of the month. hopefully, hopefully not by the end of the month, sorry, by the end of the year. So hopefully we can close that round because we have so many more things that we want to bring to market, but we need, you know, we need the funds to be able to continue to scale and to get you to build and getting to bring these solutions.

to the people that eat most.

That's awesome. I think this entire conversation has been super insightful. The question I love to ask at the end of most of our podcasts is, if you were to give advice to an up-and-coming hardware team that's in the world of med tech and maybe exploring the wellness piece and the crawl, walk, run, what would just be your anecdotal advice for them as they're getting started and growing their business?

Okay, specifically in the medical field, I would say it takes time. It's one of the slowest moving industries. So you have to be willing to commit that time. It's also going to take a ton of resources. So you have to be willing to invest those resources and let them play out. Again, I think it's passion is the most important thing because you're going to have to be passionate to move through all the hurdles and all the hills and all the bumps in the road. You're going to need that, obviously, tenacity. But I think

speaker-2 (31:57.9)
just like in real estate, right? It's location, location, location. Well, in startups, it's team, team, team. So you've got to surround yourself with the best and the brightest people who share your same passion, who want to, so Davide likes to say, do well by doing good. So we need that kind of mindset, those kinds of people, and longevity. You have to be committed to...

your task at hand, whether you're an employee or the co-founder, but you need people that are going to stick with you through the thick and the thin and really take that tenacious approach and make it come to fruition. But again, you're going to fall sometimes. Fall fast and don't fall the same way, right? So learn from your mistakes, right? We learned it as kids. Well, you get to learn it again in the world of entrepreneurship. But that's another one of our catchphrases. It's okay to fall, but fall fast.

Do well by doing good. Everybody. This is the hard tech podcast. I'm your host Deandre Hericus with my cohost, Grant Chapman. Charlene, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.