A local startup that's developing a way for athletes and non-athletes to receive professional health management just landed a digital platform for its service through a partnership with an out-of-state company.
That company, Carium, is based in Petaluma, California. It offers a health care technology platform that organizations can use to run their services. Albuquerque-based WaveOn Health, which created an app for users to connect with coaches who monitor a person's health and recovery, has teamed up with Carium.
"Having the Carium technology allows us to overlay our user experience on top of their chassis, as I call it," Adam Halpern, who founded WaveOn in 2020, told Albuquerque Business First. "So, instead of having to raise money to build out the technology environment, we're able to tap into theirs."
Using Carium has allowed WaveOn Health to build a mobile application that's available for download on the Apple app store and the Google Play store. Using the platform could help WaveOn speed up its go-to-market strategy by about two years, Halpern said.
"From a virtual care perspective, there's a lot of possibility for [WaveOn Health] and we're really happy to be their partner for this," said Julie Wolk, chief marketing officer for Carium. "A lot of technology vendors are more point-solution based. Carium … creates a full ecosystem since it's platform based. It's a duality between the person using the app and the care teams, so there is constant action flow. It's not a static flow, it's not a digital file pile."
The partnership between WaveOn Health and Carium started after Halpern met Carium's Chief Revenue Officer, John Vezina, through a college friend.
"It's not a prototype," Halpern said about WaveOn's app. "It fully works and it's only going to get better. That's the value of partnering with Carium, is it's a fully-functional app that we're now able to use to deliver our service. And it happened within two months — it was really quick."
Halpern said WaveOn is looking for more groups to work with, and he added that the startup could expand into a B-to-C, direct-to-consumer model down the road. The company currently works with organizations like fitness centers and hospital networks.
"It's much easier to have one conversation with people that have a hundred athletes than trying to spend the marketing dollars to get 10,000 onesy-twosies," he said. "As we start to scale and we have use cases and testimonials, we will then open up the floodgates to let people come in on their own."
WaveOn Health opened a pre-seed funding round in December. David Novosad, WaveOn's chief operating officer, said the startup could open a seed round in the second half of 2023 and that using Carium's technology "expedites" WaveOn's pre-seed round.
