Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth Announces 11 Companies in Its 2024 Accelerator

Source

The 2024 Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth Accelerator team. [Photo: Techstars]

Eleven companies—including two from North Texas—have been selected for the 2024 Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth Accelerator, Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth announced.

The companies were chosen from thousands of startups worldwide, representing “the best and brightest” in physical health innovation. This year’s class marks the program’s third year.

Program Manager Jordan Warnemont said her team “has worked so hard not only planning the best accelerator program possible in partnership with our world-class mentors and corporate partners, but traveling to nine different cities to source the most innovative healthcare startups in the world.”

“Getting to come alongside these life-changing founders is truly an honor and is my driving force behind my passion for serving early-stage startups in an operations role,” Warnemont added in a statement.

Additionally, the Techstars Physical Health team said it will be adding two Entrepreneurs in Residence to help with the program this year.

“Gabriela Sabate and Patrick Colletti, who are both entrepreneurs, investors, and subject matter experts with decades of experience in healthcare, will be a key part of our program to help our founders fully leverage our 13-week program to allow them to be prepared to grow and create scalable, sustainable businesses for the long run,” Managing Director Trey Bowles said. “These EiRs alongside of nearly 250 mentors in our program will provide a great environment to support, connections, counsel and accountability for the founders in the program for this year.”

The organization’s selection process focused on identifying startups that not only are innovative but also aligned with the evolving needs of the healthcare landscape. Techstars said the selected companies will benefit from the strong network it has built, including key relationships with leading health providers, health systems, hospitals, and insurance companies across North Texas.

Techstars said it will continue its partnerships with the University of North Texas Health Science Center, the city of Fort Worth, Tarrant County, and Goff Capital.

Techstars accelerator members

The North Texas-based participants selected for the accelerator are Nerveli, based in Dallas, and Southlake-based Gale Payments.

Nerveli provides users with a mobile-based empathetic and interactive pain recovery assistant that combines proven medical science, gamified Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and machine learning. The company was co-founded by CEO Leon Jacobson, a serial entrepreneur who hails from the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UT Dallas. Its leadership team includes Chief Medical Officer Dr. Amol Patwardhan, CTO Ayesha Waseem, and senior advisor Dr. Ted Price, director of the Center of Advanced Pain Studies at UT Dallas, according to the company website.

Gale Payments offers a platform for online stores that sell health and wellness products. Per LinkedIn, Gale Payments is led by Tom Griffiths, a 2x founder and former head of growth at two exited startups, and Qadeer Khan, PM and engineer at Moniepoint and Fasset.

The other 2024 Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth Accelerator participants include, per Techstars:

• Athlete, a UK-based company that offers life insurance that helps you to live longer.
• Electrokare, based in Chicago, is creating an electrolyte tracking app that leverages any existing hardware with an ECG to quantify electrolyte levels and providing actionable insights on exactly what to do to be at optimal performance and avoid healthcare complications.
• FluteSpace is based in San Francisco and improves access to healthcare by increasing physicians’ productivity.
• Gisens Biotech is a Berkeley, California-based company that uses nanotechnology to power the future of personalized medicine.
• Peeq Industries is an Omaha, Nebraska-based company using patented technologies, uniquely designed products, and readily available ones; Peeq has built strong compliance protocols for doctors and patients that ensure healthy, clean eyelids. This is the first step in fighting dry eye disease.
• Proton Health is based in London and builds infrastructure to automate dermatology care.
• Revella Health, which is based in Birmingham, Alabama, has the ARIA platform which uses AI to analyze patient-provider conversations in real-time, automating documentation, optimizing risk adjustment, and providing actionable insights to improve care delivery and outcomes for complex patients in Medicare Advantage and FQHC settings.
• ReviMo, based in Boston, creates robotic mobility devices to help people with disabilities be more independent and reduce the burden on caregivers.
• Syndicate Bio, headquartered in Delaware, is accelerating precision medicine, drug discovery, and development by including clinical and genomic datasets from the world’s most diverse regions.

Techstars kicked off its 2024 accelerator cohort with a packed house at Create FW earlier this week, where Bowles told the entrepreneurs and community stakeholders that the 11 startups selected were chosen out of 3,000 applicants. 

Get on the list.
Dallas Innovates, every day.

Sign up to keep your eye on what’s new and next in Dallas-Fort Worth, every day.

R E A D   N E X T

• 

  Recognized for its pioneering mental health and wellbeing solutions tailored for athletes, ZAMA Health has been acquired by Seattle-based Volt, which offers “hyper-personalized” strength training that “dynamically adapts” to individual athletes.

• 

  MDIC is piloting the AMCH program, with support from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, to help encourage the medical device industry to adopt advanced technology not just during device production but across the total product life cycle.

• 

  The Techstars program pumped up the volume in its second year, reviewing more than 3,500 applications—four times more than last year. Founders from around the world will travel to Fort Worth for the “one-of-a-kind,” whole health-focused program.

• 

  Techstars’ Demo Day at UNT HSC at Fort Worth will feature companies from around the world. They’ll be presenting their new physical health technologies in a “Shark Tank”-like pitch-style event. The 10 companies are high-growth, early-stage startup founders who took part in the 13-week program in Fort Worth.

• 

  The audience was spirited, cheering from their seats and giving each entrepreneur a standing ovation as they approached the stage. This was no “TED talk” … it was the Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth pitch and demo night—a showcase of innovation and demonstration of lessons learned in the accelerator.  “A lot of them have deals with customers in the North Texas area,” said Techstars Fort Worth Managing Director Trey Bowles. “For now, they’ll go back to where they came from—and then some will return here to live.” Just three months ago, some of these founders were freshly minted startups. In…

• 

  Meet the 10 promising startups that took the stage to demonstrate their potential to disrupt healthcare.

• 

  The inaugural Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth Accelerator is kicking off with 10 startups who come from all over the map—from Dallas to cities across the U.S. as well as Canada, Switzerland, and Germany. They’ll be taking up residence in Fort Worth for an “intensive” 13-week mentorship program that makes each eligible for $120,000 in seed funding from the UNT Health Science Center and Goff Capital. “We believe that Fort Worth can become the physical health innovation capital of the world, and this is an incredible next step to making that vision a reality,” says Dr. Sylvia Trent-Adams, president of…

• 

  10 startups will make history themselves as part of the world’s first physical health accelerator. Techstars Demo Day is the culmination of Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth Accelerator. It signifies more than a year of planning and a lifetime of dreaming, innovating, and disrupting industries for the 10 startups.

• 

  Trey Bowles, a longtime startup champion in DFW, will helm Fort Worth’s Techstars physical therapy-focused accelerator.  “It’s a big win for the region,” Bowles says. “Customers and capital are the things that help startups grow.”  Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth is the first accelerator for Techstars in North Texas—and the “first true accelerator in Fort Worth,” says HSC’s Cameron Cushman, a key player in attracting the program.

• 

  The project focuses on community-based intervention, and tasks HSC’s SaferCare Texas clinical executives and School of Public Health staff with developing training education alongside HSC’s new College of Nursing and Fort Worth community-based organizations.