Adelaide entrepreneur Matt Riemann and the team behind his new health app have raised more than US$100,000 ($129,000) for their venture in the space of just 24 hours.
Read more: 21-year-old entrepreneur raises $10,000 a day through crowdfunding
The app, called Shae and billed as being “Siri for health”, is a virtual assistant that draws on more than 10 years of integrated data to track how a user’s health is progressing at any given moment and help them make the right choices to improve it.
The app, developed by Riemann and his team, uses complex data on phenotypes to assess the current health of a user and make suggestions on day-to-day activities to reverse genetic health conditions.
“Shae is health without thinking,” Reimann told SmartCompany.
Earlier this month, Riemann and his team launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise US$100,000 for the development and rollout of the app.
They topped this goal within just 24 hours and to date have raised just over US$134,000 ($174,000) from 22 backers.
“It’s a very large project to undertake,” says Riemann.
Shae’s technology has taken more than a decade of development and quantifying epigenetic data to get it to a point where it can help users make the right decisions to improve their health.
It evolved out of Riemann’s first health tech venture ph360, a global personalised health platform, and its research and testing costs have amounted to more than $5 million.
With more than two weeks left of the Kickstarter campaign, the Shae team have outlined some stretch goals including the delivery of an interface to improve sleep, stress and performance if they reach $500,000 and the opening of free healthcare clinics in three disadvantaged countries if they raise $10 million.
Riemann is currently in the US promoting the app and hopes to have it fully integrated on smart Apple and Google devices.
“Our vision is that any connected device would have this automatically built in so that anyone can have perfectly personalised 100% accurate information to avoid disease,” he says.
Riemann started working on the app after being diagnosed with a genetic disease and in his search to figure out if he could reverse some of its effects, he discovered key epigenetic areas that can influence these.
“There are six main areas that can influence your health at any given point,” he says.
The app has been designed to track and offer suggestions in all of these including food, exercise and activity, climate and environment both indoors and outdoors, force of social interactions, natural genius or talent and mind or perception.
Shae can determine the best time for a user to eat, it can book you a table at a restaurant, it recommends the best time to exercise and suggests what type of training someone should do, he says.
“It gives you advice in real-time,” Riemann says.
The app also notifies users of allergens in the air and can inform people with low immune systems when they should avoid a certain environment. The app will even remind you to take your running shoes to work so you don’t miss your workout after.
“If you’re in a stressed state, it will play a funny cat video or a song to match the brain frequency to help bring you into a happy state,” he says.
“Shae will actually talk to you intuitively and critically.”
Dinushi Dias is a freelance journalist and a former StartupSmart reporter and multimedia content producer. She is the co-founder of Melbourne-based production house Dinushi & Power.
