Contrary Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on student entrepreneurs, has invested in Georgia Tech student-founded Memora Health as part of the company’s seed round. The company, which will graduate from the Y Combinator accelerator next month, also took in capital from Y Combinator and Rough Draft Ventures.
Memora Health functions as an SMS-driven personal assistant platform for clinicians, helping them automate patient discharge instructions and follow-ups. The founders, two Georgia Tech and one Harvard Medical student, aim to reduce the overall cost — about $300 billion — in the U.S. healthcare system resulting from poor patient adherence and caregiver follow-up challenges.
Memora’s virtual assistant, named Felix, is currently being used by over 1500 patients across three hospitals and 10 health clinics.
“From the start, it was very clear that this was an impressive team,” said Indra Sofian, one of Contrary’s Georgia Tech partners. “They had a unique, proven product and were working on solving one of the biggest and most costly problems in healthcare today.”
Sofian and Wesley Samples, another local Contrary partner, met the Memora Health team through their involvement in student entrepreneur organization Startup Exchange. They are members of Startup Exchange’s elite CORE community for high-performing founders.
“It’s great to represent Georgia Tech in the portfolio and help Contrary grow. They’ve been nothing but helpful thus far and we can’t wait to see how their portfolio grows,” says co-founder and CTO Kunaal Naik.
This is Contrary Capital’s sixth investment overall. The fund launched last year and came to Georgia Tech in the fall of 2017 — it has 100 student investor partners at 40 of the country’s top universities and an advisory board made up of founders of companies like Tesla, SoFi and Twitch.
Nail says the funds will be applied to technical expenses and customer acquisition. They expect to close their full seed round soon.
