27 May Navigating the Fundraising Journey with Coobi
Coobi has secured a significant portion of their pre-seed round and is preparing for a pivotal clinical study. They emphasize starting fundraising early, finding the right investors, and balancing public and private funding.At coobi, their mission is to harness technology to make addiction treatment more accessible and effective. They are developing an innovative, machine learning-based algorithm that uses digital biomarkers from smartphones and wearables to assess individual relapse risks and deliver objective insights into addictive behaviors. Their solution serves as digital aftercare for individuals recovering from addiction, providing personalized, data-driven support to enhance rehabilitation outcomes. By leveraging the power of technology, coobi aims to transform the landscape of addiction treatment, making help more readily available and improving the efficiency of care. Discover coobi’s strategies, challenges, and the immense opportunities in the mental health startup space.
- Fundraising is not easy and can be frustrating, but the positive side is that people who are evaluating your business with the intention of investing money in it will give you honest and unbiased feedback (at least by saying yes or no). The investor feedback was extremely important for us to further develop our business model.
Q: What are your current feelings and experiences regarding your fundraising journey?
A: Fundraising is not easy and can be frustrating, but the positive side is that people who are evaluating your business with the intention of investing money in it will give you honest and unbiased feedback (at least by saying yes or no). The investor feedback was extremely important for us to further develop our business model.
The right mindset and a certain amount of persistence are super important to convince investors.
What are the next steps for coobi?
Our next steps concerning fundraising are that we have a big chunk of our pre-seed round committed and we are now well prepared to continue our journey outside of VHP and to reach the next milestone which is a clinical study. However we are still open for strategic investors who can support us also with experience and network in the healthcare sector.
Getting the first commitment. We experienced that many business angels where generally interested, but it is hard to find the first one who makes the first step.
Another challenge is that there are still very few standards for fair early stage funding in place. Unfortunately frameworks like a SAFE are not standard yet in Germany. Therefore, even smaller investments require a lot of negotiations and time.
What are your main take away from the Vision Health Pioneers Incubator regarding fundraising?
That fundraising takes time and it is important to start early enough to not get too stressed in the end. It is crucial to find the right investor and not just any investor.
What is your best practice to reach out investors?
As frustrating as it may sound my experience so far is, that warm intros are still the best way to get to meaningful conversations. Therefore, building up a network even when you are not fundraising is necessary (unfortunately).
Would you use German public funding or you’d rather go for private money?
There are great public funding possibilities out there which will be crucial for us as we are a company with high scientific standards and big research goals. However public funding comes with the challenges of long application timeframes and often startups have to make the payments in advance and only get them reimbursed. Therefore, the cashflow challenge remains. So a mix between private and public funding is inevitable for us.
How do you see the current opportunities of mental health startups like coobi?
We saw a lot of scepticism towards B2C business models for mental health, but no-one would argue that the problems around mental health are still huge and unsolved. More and more people are looking for support and can’t find it because the lack of specialised support is immense and gets worse with the demographic change. Therefore, we experienced a high interest from investors and payers for a B2B solution like ours which can be integrated in to the current support system and offer new ways of more effective therapy.
Follow coobi’s startup journey here!