We caught up with the award winners at the 2019 MassChallenge HealthTech Finale to get their reaction to winning, their thoughts on the Massachusetts digital health ecosystem, and find out what their experiencing in the latest MCHT cohort was like.
Anthony Benigni
Head of Integration
Patient data aggregation platform for app developers, providers, and patients
“We started with just three guys and grew to 12. The help from MassChallenge has been unbelievable and the local connections they helped us with have been unbelievable. Massachusetts is just an amazing place for a startup.”
Arun K. Buduri
President
Develops AI technology that uses visual recognition to detect zero-day phishing attacks
“Boston is a fantastic place to build a startup, especially in cybersecurity and in healthcare, because both are right here and so is MassChallenge. MassChallenge has been at the center of our success. We are a two-time MassChallenge company and for a startup at our stage to get to work with such companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco, MeHI, and BWH, is fantastic.”
Shrenik Jain
CEO
Mobile app for anonymous text-based group psychotherapy
“Being in Massachusetts has been very important to us as we are headquartered here. We are a local company. Our mission is focused on scaling substance misuse and mental health treatment to the most vulnerable populations, so MassChallenge allowed us to form policies with other entities like Anthem, like Massachusetts Health Policy Commission, that we just could not have formed otherwise as a new business. They were very instrumental in helping us connect.
“It’s not the first award we’ve won as a startup, but this is a very impactful award for us because Anthem is the most significant player in the mental health space, so it’s very humbling to receive this recognition from them and we are hopeful we can work more closely with them in the coming months.”
Justin Boogaard
Co-Founder
Help older adults use on-demand transportation companies without needing a smartphone
“MassChallenge: awesome. The companies in MassChallenge: incredible. The staff at MassChallenge: so helpful. Go Go has a consumer business that is still the largest part of where our revenue comes from and we weren’t thinking about health care at all. Our experience with MassChallenge got us to the heart of health care: Boston, Massachusetts. We were told by so many people that we have an opportunity to make a huge impact on health care just by getting people to appointments, something we were seeing in the consumer business, but it just hadn’t clicked for us how important it was and that would have never happened had it not been for this program. So now we are seeing the impact as pertains to numbers. Our enterprise number has been growing 20 percent a month, we’re doing 20,000 medical rides a month.”
Heather Waibel
CEO
Welnys is a marketplace for on-premise workplace health and wellness services
“MassChallenge been really great because we are not a Massachusetts company and getting to know this ecosystem, the clients, and the investor community has been incredible. I think this is probably the best place for digital health or med tech companies, just because the whole ecosystem is here. Every part of the ecosystem is really well developed in this area. If I was just starting out this where I would do it.”