Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series. You can find part two here.
As founders, Julia Regan and Aaron Gani have both climbed a proverbial mountain over the past few years — only to find there’s another mountain after you reach the first plateau.
The next summit from them is the one that you gaze up at when you introduce yourself less as a founder but more as a CEO — as one deals with larger capital raises, increased headcount and a formation of a board of directors (among other issues).
Regan founded RxLightning, a digital platform that expedites the specialty medication enrollment process. Gani founded BehaVR, which uses virtual reality, cloud computing and machine learning as a means of digital therapeutics aid in addiction recovery and stress reduction, among other ailments. Today he's CEO of RealizedCare.
On the morning of the third day of Endeavor’s National Selection Panel at the new Story building in NuLu, Regan and Gani took part in a fireside chat from which much insight could be gleaned — so much that I have chosen to turn their nuggets of advice into a two-part piece.
Side note: Louisville-based Limitless Minds was one of the four companies that were selected for Endeavor, an international entrepreneurial network during the three-day event.
Additional side note: I recently toured the new Story building at 828 E. Market St., and will have a story on the new venue later this week, with a photo gallery.
After all, Regan and Gani are two of the biggest success stories in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem in recent memory in terms of raising capital and creating a national name in their respective markets. They also both happen to reside in the health care space, which Regan called “notoriously slow.”
“In my business, my biggest competitor is still the fax machine … We’re in 2024,” Regan told the crowd. “That is crazy that the fax machine, still, in healthcare, is considered the [most secure] way for patient data transfer between parties.”
The rise of Regan’s New Albany, Indiana-based RxLightning has been anything but slow. It’s been well documented since its founding in 2020 and named one of our 2023 Inno Fire Award winners for the “On The Rise” category.
The company, which was one of our 2022 Startups to Watch, has raised approximately $20.5 million — including $17.5 million in 2023 — since its founding. On the Endeavor side of the equation, RxLightning joined a rare group of companies that jumped over the national round of acceptance and went to the top prize of getting the green light at the organization’s International Selection Panel (ISP) event in 2022 in Greece.
A former chief technology officer at Humana (NYSE: HUM), Gani is the founder and CEO of BehaVR, which also was named as a 2022 Startup to Watch (when it had raised $11 million total at that point from seed and Series A rounds). The company, based out of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, broke onto the health tech scene in 2016 — three years before being named an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2019 at an ISP event in Mexico.
“I had a great tenure there,” Gani said of his 12 years at Humana, “but I was desperate to start a business. I was going to die unhappy.”
In 2023, the company merged with New Jersey-based Fern Health to become RealizedCare, with Gani serving as the CEO. The company, which is focusing on tackling the issue of chronic pain through its modalities, has a headcount of 28 — with six employees living in the Louisville area.
Enjoyment v. pain
On the topic of raising capital, Regan admitted that she enjoys the process.
“There’s a thrill to convincing someone around what you're going to do, with getting people to believe it,” said Regan, whose team self-funded the business for the first nine months of its existence.
“I didn’t realize you could actually raise capital with just a PowerPoint and just an idea,” said Regan, who did not start pitching to investors until it had its minimum viable product, resulting in two large union contracts right off the bat.
Regan, whose company has a headcount of approximately 40, also pointed out that her enjoyment of raising capital has been bolstered by the fact that her company has not had to deal with any major distractions with its original business.
And then there’s Gani, who scattered one-liners throughout the duration of the event.
“It’s very painful. It’s very challenging, and I hate it,” said Gani, to a laughing audience.
Gani did point out that 80% of its Series A round, in which he raised approximately $7.2 million in 2021, came from Louisville. He added that he received his first investment from John Willmoth from Poplar Ventures. Others included Chrysalis Ventures (David Jones, Jr.), Thornton Capital (Matt Thornton), Future Labs Capital (Mack Swhab), CompaniesWood (Phoebe Wood), and Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation (Keyhorse Capital) among others based in the Louisville metro area.
That was before BehaVR raised $13 million in a Series B round in 2023 with larger investors such as Optum Ventures (Boston), Oxford Science Enterprises (UK), Accenture Ventures (San Francisco) — after it merged with OxfordVR earlier in the year.
“I bootstrapped for a couple of years, and built the platform and was figuring a lot of things out,” said Gani, who has overseen RealizedCare raise an additional $5 million since the merger with Fern Health. “And then we went out to get external capital, we just wouldn’t be here without the Louisville systems and investors. … For us it’s been a real challenge, because we’re doing something that’s like new on top of new on top of new.
“VR is still new — and was really new in 2016 — and I had no idea what I was doing, so that didn’t help. But fortunately, we captured a lot of fun learning challenges and had a lot of help from this community.”
