Notus Labs, the Cleveland health-tech startup, has launched a private beta test of its athlete safety and performance technology with the football team at Cleveland's Benedictine High School.
It's a milestone for the young company and its co-founders, Evan Davies, CEO, and Tim Walker, chief operating officer, who launched their company while working in a biomedical engineering lab at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Not only are Davies and Walker learning to be fundraisers — they're angling for $3 million in seed money to grow Notus Labs — they are transitioning from their "heavy engineering backgrounds" to being business managers and sales leaders, Walker told the Cleveland Business Journal.
It's been a "transformation for both of us," Walker said. "It's a completely different world. So making that transition has been a challenge."
Notus One is a wearable sensor about the size of a thick quarter "loaded with advanced biometric sensors" that monitor athletes' heart rate, core temperature and movements in real time, according to Notus Labs' website. Originally designed for elite athletes such as marathoners, the sensors wirelessly transmit data to a digital dashboard monitored by coaches, trainers and medical staff.
Davies and Walker have made 500 sensors, some of which will be used in the Benedictine beta, Davis said. The co-founders also have refined their algorithms and software that makes sense of the sensors' data.
The Notus team expects to do beta tests with a few more high school football teams this spring and summer before launching their Notus One technology in August, Davies said. The co-founders also are seeking feedback from Benedictine football coaches about whether their technology works as stated and how to make it better.
For instance, this feedback is expected to speed the movement of the Notus One system beyond keeping athletes safe from hazards such as heatstroke to collecting historical performance data that enables coaches to better manage their teams and players.
"We're focused on getting the live stuff to work perfectly," Davies said. "And then we're collecting more data on people, building out that sort of longer-term analysis over the next couple of months."
Team performance analysis "wasn't ... one of our initial goals," he said, but it "makes way more sense for us. The coaches are pretty excited about that."
Davies and Walker expect to use their first capital to propel their company into "full-scale commercialization, [and to] build out a sales team, bring on a couple more engineers ... and support people," Davies said. "Tim and I are still doing all that right now."
The plan is to refine the Notus One technology by working with high school and college sports teams and then move into that professional sports teams market, Davies said.
