We are one week away from Lisbon Investment Summit, the slightly unexpected startup conference that gathers the most daring innovators, corporate visionaries, and top-tier investors. We spoke with Daniela Seixas, CEO of TonicApp, and winner of last year’s competition, who will be joining Beta-i at #LIS again.
TonicApp, dedicated to the medical community, is an app that aggregates the most useful medical tools for doctors. It lets medical practitioners discuss clinical cases, check drug conversion tables and get informed on healthcare news – it even has a secure case discussion platform that connects doctors that can help each other in providing better care for patients.
Daniela, a medical doctor herself (neuroradiologist), felt the need to create a place for the community to convey and share. “It was a necessity I felt myself and all doctors as we see it. Today, doctors are overwhelmed with pressure from all sides – about costs, about time, and even legal situations in some markets like the United States. Besides that, the scientific knowledge is ever expanding and, nowadays, fragmented across the internet. So the idea was to create a go-to platform for all doctors that solves most of the problems they face daily.”
The startup has a connection with Beta-i from its early days – having participated in open-innovation programs like Techcare, backed by Novartis with whom TonicApp has partnered up -, so Lisbon Investment Summit made sense to them.
“We consider Lisbon Investment Summit to be one of the best events in entrepreneurship and investment in Portugal and Europe. At this time last year, we were starting our fundraising, and we specifically decided to start it at LIS, and we applied to pitch to have the exposure we needed. We’re closing the round now and even though we didn’t meet our investors at LIS, we definitely started the process there and communicated differently with each one, and it worked – we got the visibility we needed.”
The startup is not stopping anytime soon – they aim to be the ecosystem doctors need to thrive in all aspects of their profession, giving them the tools and information they need to keep thriving and providing the best care they can give to their patients.
“Tonic App has a lot of resources for doctors – some of them are clinical and some are not. This is our bet, we want to help doctors in their professional life, be it helping them diagnose and treat their patients or other areas.”
To create this, TonicApp is partnering up with other players and entities in a collaborative environment, to progress faster in a fast-paced innovative space.
“Building on an ecosystem idea, we want to work with all players in the ecosystem that have valuable resources for doctors, so we create partnerships with multinationals, like Randstad, or Medtronic or Novartis, but also with public entities, scientific organizations, and other startups like us, like Eventtia and SerFarma. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to develop software ourselves when it already exists – we work as a channel for doctors.”
TonicApp will be at this year’s edition of Lisbon Investment Summit, and Daniela will be speaking at one of the panels at Google Stage – at the Book Launch: “Ara the Star Engineer”. The book tells the story of a young girl who loves numbers and uses her smarts to solve a big problem, by creating an algorithm and encountering real-life women tech trailblazers of diverse backgrounds. It aims to inspire young girls to pursue STEM careers and bring gender equality to the table in the sector.
As a doctor and female founder, Daniela is no stranger to the quest, bringing their unique perspective as a woman, doctor and entrepreneur: “I didn’t feel discrimination much as a female founder. Actually, even though entrepreneurship is a male-dominated field, much more than medicine – which nowadays has a lot more women than men – it’s a much more equitable environment for gender. Founding my own company and becoming its CEO, depended solely on me and my work during this time. In medicine, reaching a leadership position would not depend on me or my accomplishments, but on the established institutions.”
After 157 applications from 35 different countries that included 15% focused on Insurtech, 28% on Fintech and 31% on Healthtech and after a selection process, Protechting is ready to receive its 25 finalists selected for the bootcamp.
Among the selected 23 there are 5 from Portugal, 5 from Spain, 4 from Germany, 3 from the UK, 2 from the US, 2 from Macau, 1 from Mozambique, 1 from Finland and 1 from France.
Meet them – even though just online – and know what they do:
Medicsen (Spain) – Non-invasive artificial pancreas for diabetes: Predictive AI + smartpatch. It improves quality of life in the diabetic patients providing them with a personalized, automatic and non-invasive treatment, decreasing associated complications like blindness or amputations.
HUMANOO (Germany) – Empowers people to achieve their personal health goals. How? With the help of e-therapists. They count with the support of 40 people from 10 different countries from creative minds, fitness freaks, physiotherapists, yoga gurus to food bloggers.
SkinSoul (Portugal) – a technology that allows Medical Doctors (MD) from all specialties to screen for skin cancer their patients, with immediate feedback given by a tested AI system. Then the MD can immediately create a referral to the dermatologist. All in less than 2 minutes.
Criamtech (Portugal) – CRIAM stands for Chemical Reaction Image Analysis for Mobility, a portable medical device that identifies the human ABO and Rh blood type and subtype within 3 minutes, and detects diseases. CRIAM represents a new methodology for blood phenotyping based on a cartridge (with the specific reagents for the test) and on image processing techniques to determine the occurrence of agglutination – between blood sample and reagent.
Cardiomo (United States of America) – the mobile app serves as a display for vitals and metrics as well as a medication schedule reminder. It is also a communication center for user and designated observers — doctors, family, friends. When vitals go beyond normal range or the AI spots abnormalities in the EKG, there is a push notification to the user and/or observers stating the nature of the issue. This remote monitoring feature provides more precious time for rescuers in case of an emergency. The AI adjusts itself to each user thus providing more accurate diagnostics.
Supaspot (United States of America) – Captures lifestyle data from GenZ using the SUPA App at sports and music events (brand partnerships) from IoT devices (wearables, mobile phone apps). GenZ continues using the SUPA App and captures data.
Rnters (Portugal) – a peer-to-peer rental marketplace where users can rent or safely monetize any item. scene, there was no simple or safe alternative to purchasing a new board, which didn’t make sense for a casual traveller.
Gistek (Spain) – Develops advanced and independent solutions in the insurance sector that improve their value chain through automation, standardization, interconnection, communication and confidentiality, always promoting simplicity of management, cloud computing, mobility, e-commerce, e-invoice, groupware, document management, systems interconnection and Business Intelligence.
CopSonic (France) – A new, patented, universal contactless communication protocol enabling digital security, smart detection and IoT connectivity between electronic devices in either attended or unattended or automated mode. Not limited to smartphones, computers, connected devices and peripherals, other machines. Distributed through an SDK and white labelled applications, the solution can be integrated by B2B partners within their vertical activities and existing environments (applications, web sites, servers…) as a complement or alternative to state-of-the-art technologies such as NFC, Bluetooth or QR Codes which are currently suffering from the compatibility rate issues and poor UX on the end user side.
Working Minds (Spain) – It delivers affordable, remote treatment and develops AI-based diagnostic tools for mental disorders.
Senseitrade (Spain) – Their mobile-first investment platform seeks to democratize investing and targets demographics that have been priced out of investing on the stock exchange notably due to costly broker fees. It offers a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to search for companies that are trading on an exchange. The platform has no restriction around portfolio sizes and operates on a low-commission model so low value traders are not excluded. It offers smart alerts when relevant information is published on the internet or social media. So investors can make decisions in stock markets more informed.
BillFront (Germany) – They make it easy for young and growing digital media companies to access funding by connecting to their accounting and invoicing systems and getting their receivables as security.
CoinAnalyst (Germany) – It’s a software system that enables any trader in the crypto asset sector and other industries to access a dashboard which monitors and analyses real-time data from the crypto and ICO market. CoinAnalyst is based on the patented Cogia technology which uses semantic indexing and structuring of online data using pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. Additionally, the system provides news, price quotes and messaging. Similar to the information provider Bloomberg in the traditional financial market, they want to become the equivalent information provider in the crypto market – not exclusive like Bloomberg, but open for the mass market.
Wall-i (Portugal) – Wall-I.TV is the most advanced cloud-based Digital Signage OS, able to provide segmented content for the audience consuming the information and versatile enough to be adaptable to the presentation of contents within different context requirements, taking advantage of the IoT’s opportunities for the widely spread of the technology within the context of Smart Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising, Smart Cities and Industry 4.0. It provides immediate deployment and setup within different media display contexts, audience metrics, insights and interaction, ambience monitoring, APIs for integration, and both big and small business reach.
Spin Analytics (United Kingdom) – Brings digital transformation in Credit Risk Management by leveraging predictive analytics, AI and ML techniques on Big Data. It is a software framework that also implements and fully automates many modern sophisticated methodologies and algorithms used by the world leaders in the industries of Banking and Credit Modeling for effective Risk Management purposes and regulatory purposes.
Reputation Transfer (United Kingdom) – Makes tools that pull the user’s data from sharing economy platforms upon request, having verified that the data is sourced from the correct accounts. The verification process doesn’t require either the user’s credentials or the exporting platform’s consent.
Sharemy (United Kingdom) – The platform is based on a Shared Ledger framework which is underpinned by a machine learning & block chain model. Our focus is help enabled the users in the peer to peer market place to use our service to give them a on demand insurance service for peer peer transactions. Our mobile & desktop application is targeted at current and new peer to peer services where the renter/seller of that service need an on-demand insurance support/cover. Our second channel of focus is to offer the service to brands or retailers looking to enter the peer to peer marketplace, for examples tool manufacturers looking to rents tools versus buy them.
LitigationCoin (Germany) – Provides legal tech solutions for litigation financiers on different occasions.
B2Quant (Portugal) – It aims to explore the potential of automated quantification tools in the analysis of medical images. The starting point is QuantEmTool (QET), a quantification method developed within the context of a MSc thesis in Biomedical engineering. QET allows automatic segmentation of global brain volumes and FLAIR magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequence hyperintensities, and following calculation of brain atrophy and lesion load, particularly relevant indicators to multiple sclerosis follow-up. QET can also be of value in the follow-up of other neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson and Alzheimer.
Fjuul (Finland) – Provides a digital platform that enables insurers to offer digital smart insurance using real-time data to increase customer engagement and trigger preventive care rather than providing just pure risk coverage.
Tech (Mozambique) – It’s a company launched completely for Mozambican people, where its own main goal is to generate applicable and innovative solutions to Mozambican needs. These solutions answer to needs in different sectors of society, based on Communication and information technology.
TMASS (Macau) – It aims to provide revolutionary solutions for quantitative and qualitative analyses of protein molecules, which covers various aspects of human healthcare including “precision medicine”, “therapeutic protein drugs” and “medical cosmetology”. It strives to solve the issues of high cost, long development time, long turnaround time, low accuracy and poor quality control.
Baylife Tech (Macau) – They’ve developed a groundbreaking technology that enables the storage of stem cells under room-temperature and oxygen-free conditions for more than 10 days with ensured cell viability and functions, thus saving costly cryopreservation equipment and the corresponding process.
The Bootcamp will run until June 22. Know more about the program here.
Fidelidade and Fosun launched the third edition of the startup acceleration programme – Protechting -, which aims to support the development of international projects that contribute to improve the protection of people in three strategic areas – Healthtech, Insurtech and Fintech.
Just like the other two editions, this third one will also be developed with the support of Beta-I, also with recently reinforced valences, allowing it to contribute in an even more efficient way to the innovation ecosystem.
As a result of the first 2 editions of this Open Innovation incentive programme, 6 startups, from 4 different countries, still maintain cooperation with Fidelidade Group and with Luz Saúde, contributing to the creation and implementation of innovative solutions.
This third edition is devoted to the promotion of international entrepreneurship and will present some innovations. Luz Saúde will reinforce its participation in the programme, and the German private bank Hauck & Aufhäuser, owned by Fosun Group, will integrate this project for the first time, seeking to attract technological innovation for financial services through Fintech.
The main goal is still to find more consistent startups to the programme and in order to do that international scouting initiatives will happen during the application phase, with partner entities and at entrepreneurship events specifically dedicated to Insurtech and Fintech, in London, São Paulo and Silicon Valley. The programme will also be presented during Startup Europe Week, taking place in Brussels, between May the 5th and 9th. Showing how far this programme has come and how much it grew.
The excitement among partners is understandable, not only because there’s new companies participating but also because every year they are able to reach more countries. And that is one of the reasons why it’s increasingly positioning itself as an internationally renowned acceleration programme.
Last year three startups were selected on the Pitch day and later went to China to participate in Protechting | Innostar. The good thing about this is that initially only one startup was meant to be selected to go to China, but they liked all three so much they couldn’t choose. So, we never know what might happen this year.
