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Investments

Launching Chiron—AI-driven self care for long term conditions

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Investments

Launching Chiron—AI-driven self care for long term conditions

Words Founders Factory

January 16th 2024 / 3 min read

We’re excited to announce the latest business to spin out of our Venture Studio in partnership with Reckitt—Chiron.

The problem

50% of people living in the UK have a long term health condition. By their nature, these conditions are incurable, they’re persistent, and they can have a debilitating effect on your day-to-day life.

Addressing and responding to these conditions take up the majority of GPs’ schedules. Self-care options are recommended in treatment guidelines for many conditions, but it’s not being actioned, and what may work for one person may not necessarily work for another. It can be hard to know what will work, especially with endless sources of often-conflicting information. Continuous tracking can feel burdensome and frustrating if it is making no significant difference.

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The solution

Chiron is an AI driven healthcare platform, providing a new personalised self-care treatment pathway for people suffering from long term health conditions—starting with fibromyalgia, a condition that causes widespread pain and extreme tiredness that is believed to affect as many as 1 in 20 people in the UK.

Their platform uses machine learning to recommend exactly the right evidence-based self-management intervention for each person, based on their individual profile, and then creates a customised treatment programme which reactively adjusts to changes in their health data on a daily basis. Chiron becomes more intelligent with each user contributing more signals to train the algorithm and increase personalisation.

There are numerous benefits here for both patients and healthcare providers. For patients, Chiron eliminates the guesswork in chronic disease management, helping users find treatments that are most likely to help, and then providing a simple way to run multiple iterative micro lifestyle tests whilst analysing and actioning the results.. It also helps reduce the admin work of managing a disease, with a clear focus on action. For healthcare providers, this radically reduces one of the biggest time burdens on healthcare provision, saving healthcare providers potentially trillions.

The team

Carron Manning (CEO & co-founder)

Carron brings over two decades of experience in healthcare. Having trained in physiotherapy and sport & exercise medicine, Carron held numerous physiotherapy positions in the NHS as well as for Team GB, England Rugby, and Tottenham Hotspur FC. In 2016, she co-founded EXI, a platform offering personalised physical activity prescriptions for people living with long-term health conditions.

Davide Crescenzi (CTO and co-founder)

Davide is an expert in the field of data science and AI. Prior to Chiron, he co-founded Calton, a customer experience and review management solution, where as CTO he was responsible for development of the company's tech platform, from cloud architecture and AI algorithms to back-end and front-end design and development.

Karen Lawson (CSO and co-founder)

Karen has led multiple global innovation and technology teams including at Nike Inc where she held the position of Chief Architect and Senior Director of consumer digital product. Karen has a Doctorate of Engineering (Computational Intelligence) from UCL and recently completed an MSc in nanotechnology for healthcare at Oxford University.

Why we’re excited to invest

Levi Young, sector director for home & hygiene, says: “Addressing the challenges that patients with long term conditions face is taking on a huge market—potentially up to 50% of the UK population. By starting by supporting people with fibromyalgia, Chiron can demonstrate the power of their AI led approach to chronic disease management, demand for which is underlined by their quickly signing over 1000 users to their waitlist. Given Carron’s deep expertise in the healthcare industry, backed by her co-founders’ clout in product and technology, we’re confident in their ability to scale this potentially life changing technology.”

What they're looking to get out of the programme

Achieve organic growth of Chiron via an initial B2C release
Continue to improve product market fit, expand the data science to include predictive and prescriptive recommendations
Transition to a B2B model for healthcare organisations/pharma and sign our first partnership contracts
Raise capital