Pete sat down for another edition of ‘On the Couch’ and this time with the team from ResusRight, to find out what problems their startup is designed to solve and how the accelerator experience has been so far.
Check out the full Q&A responses from Matt and Mark…
Mark, can you tell us what problem ResusRight is trying to solve?
Mark: Around the world, there are 145 million babies born every year and eight million actually require our help to breathe. We do this with a device, that squeezes a breath of life into a baby who’s born not breathing. Now sadly 1.8 million babies every year die on the first day of life and a further one million survive with permanent brain damage. Most of the time babies who either die or sustain a subsequent disability, could have been prevented and this can be achieved by getting resuscitation right. We’ve built a resuscitation device to simply put into the circuit, it pops on to the system very easily and is a world-first to provide information for the clinician to know what they’re doing and shows the volume and how much leak they’ve got and essentially indicates to them how to get resuscitation right, which is crucial to saving babies.
Matt, you’re the engineer behind this product what’s it taken to get the product at this point?
Matt: Myself and Matt the other engineer, we’ve been working hard at this for the past few months. It’s been amazing we’re now working with an industrial design firm on the next iteration and we’ve been really working in the field closely with doctors, midwives and nurses to ensure that this device is getting them the critical information they need but it’s doing it in a way that’s easy to understand, quick, portable and that it’s affordable enough that it can be distributed to the places that actually need it most.
Mark, you and the team applied to come into Remarkable. What did you hope to get out of your experience with remarkable?
Mark: What we’ve got out of Remarkable is truly remarkable. The program has taken our team from being a bunch of engineers and clinicians and scientists to the next stage which is a team working to build a company that will get our device into the hands of every clinician. We’ve been introduced to the startup ecosystem, which is a tight group of people who are in the business of making startups come to life with a particular focus on businesses working on social equity and reducing disability. We’ve been pushed really hard and stretched in every direction but hopefully, we’ll graduate as a company that’s going to make a big difference and get our products to market hopefully within 12 months.
Is there something that you’re hoping to get out of the remainder of the accelerator program?
Matt: I just can’t wait for Demo day to show off everything that we’ve learned over the past 16-week program and hopefully educate a few more people and get them on board with our journey.
What is one piece of advice that you give to another aspiring startup?
Matt: The biggest thing that I’ve learned through Remarkable is you have to surround yourself with the right people, the right network of connections and the right mentors because as a startup founder you know nothing and so you need people who are there to be able to give you the right ingredients and their knowledge to allow you to take your startup forward.
Mark: I’d add that it’s a scary space going from having a great idea and then taking that idea to market. Remarkable has tested us to understand what is needed to do this. I think particularly the Remarkable accelerator is a bit of a dress test for every aspect of your assumptions and I would hazard a guess that no one ends up at the end of the process with the same startup as what they’d begun with because this entire process is an evolution through design iteration and mentoring.
Where do you hope to be in five years’ time?
Mark: We’re going to have our Resuscitation device with every birth attendant and every ambulance ready to go at every accident. It will be a device not only for babies but children adults it will revolutionise resuscitation anywhere in the world and it’s crucial in this era of COVID-19, as resuscitation has never been more important than getting it right and we’re ready and able to make it happen.
Matt: If I if I can just add to that Mark, I think beyond just the ResusRight monitor there’s a real opportunity in the medical space to serve people that have been underserved by the current system and to deliver affordable medical solutions that can reach communities that currently don’t have the specialist care that we see in the well-funded hospitals. So I think that’s our sort of ultimate goal and we’re working towards driving that positive change.
Mark: One more thing, the really exciting is that we’ve got strong linkages into big research projects aiming to help our Indigenous brothers and sisters particularly with birth on country, which is crucial to a large element of a restoration of the wrongs done to our First Nations people and this device, and so we’re thrilled that we might be able to help and get some progress happening there.
