Happy Holidays from the Founders of Prorizon, Claire and Joly!
It has been a busy and exciting year and has reached that time for celebration and reflection.
As we make our way through our startup journey, we would like to thank you for your continued support and look forward to the new opportunities and progress that 2023 will bring.
In this newsletter, we cover our updates regarding fundraising, collaborations, product development, our team and any other current and exciting news.
We would like our newsletter to be a platform where you, our ambassadors, athletes, collaborators and supporters gain information about our progress, but also a platform to be heard and seen. So please do reach out with your updates. We would love to hear from you.
We wish you all a joyous festive season!
Fundraising
We are proud to announce that our application for the Innovate UK Fast Start grantwas successful. Over the six months funding period (November 2022 – April 2023), this grant will enable us to develop and pilot launch our iOS and Android mobile apps to support athletes in gaining better awareness of their health and performance, as well as to extend our datasets collected and our research and development scope.
To date, we have successfully raised ~£150,000 via investments from Zinc VC, the Growth Through Innovation Fund and Innovate UK. We extend our gratitude towards them all.
We are also actively fundraising for our seed round to progress our mission: to achieve lifelong health for all by building the tools needed to integrate and optimise mind and body. More details on this will be published in 2023.
Collaborations and Partnerships
Calling athletes: We believe co-creation is key to developing a versatile, informed and valued product. Hence, we continue to build our collaborations with athletes. We are keen to invite current and retired athletes to trial our product, engage with each other, and provide insights and experiences to improve our product and services. If you are interested, please get in touch with us: claire@prorizon.tech.
In October, following an invitation from London Sport and Sport Tech Hub, we presented Prorizon to the Sport and Innovation postgraduate students at Loughborough University. We enjoyed vibrant discussions during the Q&A session and received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the students and organisers.
We thank Sports Tech Hub for this opportunity and for recognising us as “Founders of the Week”. We look forward to collaborating with Sports Tech Hub and its network in 2023.
We are pleased to announce that we are working with The England Touch Association, towards the launch of our initial product and associated services, in January 2023. Additional discussions are underway relating to other partnerships, due to commence in the New Year. Updates will be provided as these discussions progress.
Conversations are also underway with the University of Wolverhampton in order to engage with their scholar athletes for insight generation and product testing. We are also in discussions with Sheffield Hallam University to further develop our product with relevant clinical and sport psychology support and small business startup expertise.
We are also working with Loughborough University in association with their Digital Skills Programme. Two of their postgraduate students are working with us for eight weeks in order to provide us with their skills, fresh perspectives and creativity around data visualisation and user interface design.
We have broadened our scope Internationally and have had early discussions with Kenyon College in the US regarding potential pilots with their sport team.
Paul Musa, Founder and Host of the “What the Footie” podcast, has partnered up with us to produce an episode that focuses on players’ mental and physical health in high-performance environments and highlights Prorizon and our mission in the podcast and blog posts. He will also be our Advisor to provide us with insights and access to athletes and their supporting network of teams.
Product Development
We thank the athletes who engaged with our two-week staggered pilot study to determine the feasibility and reliability of subjective and objective mood data collection. This pilot was invaluable in informing the current build of our app and the large data set collected regarding perceptions of mood and values relating to health and performance. We saw early and exciting evidence of behaviour change relating to the value the athletes placed on their mental health. We are now conducting further data analyses, using machine learning, to assess the validity and reliability of the data collected.
In other news, our product team have been busy building a functional early version of our mobile app for iOS and Android use. It enables in-app mood and performance assessments, wearable data integration, data insights, and live chats. The usability and reliability of the app are now being tested and due to be launched in January.
Our Team
We are excited to welcome Dr. Sandra Ortega-Martorell to our team as our Data Science Advisor, and Brian Maguire as our Data Architect Advisor.
Dr. Oretega-Martorell has already started working with our data collected from the pilot to perform unsupervised probabilistic machine learning. These very early results positively support the feasibility of generating individualised mood profiles. She also supports us with our search for a senior data science expert. We thank Turing Talent for providing us with potential high-level candidates for this role.
Brian is a highly-experienced Chief Architect for health, security, insurance and financial services companies. He is advising us on the execution of our data architecture, digital transformation, technology delivery and team building.
We would like to extend our gratitude to Hanan Salahadin from Boston University, who completed her 6-weeks internship with us. Hanan worked on a few projects with us, including data analysis, challenging the reliability and validity of smart wearable devices, and developing important aspects of our data visualisation. We wish Hanan the best of luck and happiness in her final semester back in the US and all her future endeavours.
From Jan 2023, interns from Boston University and University of Connecticut will join our team to provide support in business development, marketing and data analytics.
Founders Update
Claire has been invited to become a visiting Professor at the University of Wolverhampton to consolidate and extend the link we are developing with their scholar athletes. She is also pleased to announce that two of her PhD students were awarded their degrees following successful vivas in December.
Joly was invited to join the CMO Club, an exclusive members club for senior marketing leaders, to gain insights, enhance marketing skills and leadership, and expand network.
Join our team! We’re looking for driven and enthusiastic advisors, participants, ambassadors and interns. Feel free to get in touch with us and be a part of something big. Know someone who might be interested? Share our newsletter and spread the word.
Once again, we would like to thank you for your time and relentless support.
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