In the summer of 2022, everything changed for entrepreneur Omar Fuentes.
His Tampa-based telehealth company, AccelEQ, was accepted to the Antler accelerator program in Boulder, Colorado. Fuentes packed his bags for two months and shortly after raised $200,000 from the venture capital firm.
“Personally, we were fighting toward the bitter end,” Fuentes said. “When Antler invested in us, I’m pretty sure that was my last dollar. It was, ‘They better invest, or I’ll have to figure out if I have to sell my house or not.’”
That investment ballooned into a $575,000 pre-seed round, which allowed Fuentes to secure two large contracts that propelled his company to grow.
The company was founded in December 2020 when Fuentes’ wife was undiagnosed and then misdiagnosed before discovering she had stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“Had her physician been able to use our technology, it would’ve been able to free them up, take a close look, put the dots together and catch the cancer sooner,” Fuentes said. Because it was caught later, his wife had to go through a more aggressive form of treatment.
But now, the company is going through a bit of an overhaul. AccelEQ has shifted the model to focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning, allowing it to be licensed to hospital systems. The technology is used to listen when a physician is speaking, break down the medical codes, structure a note and feed that to the provider’s electronic health record, avoiding duplicating efforts.
“Our purpose is to give physicians their time back and eliminate 15 hours-plus a week that’s spent on just documentation,” Fuentes said. “So now, they can focus on patient care.”
Eventually, Fuentes hopes to build out the product road map to include automated ordering, and suggest diagnoses and treatment plans.
“Once we made the shift to licensing the tech and focusing on AI, the clarity was there,” Fuentes said. “Everything — all the noise, everything everyone told me to do — went away and our mission was absolutely clear.”
It was that clarity that Fuentes believes is what enticed Steve Ponce to join the team as co-founder and chief product officer. Ponce has spent 18 years working at Tampa General Hospital and has known Fuentes for 30-plus years.
“When I was going through building out our platform and starting to make that shift, I engaged Steve,” Fuentes said. “He saw the value in our tech because hospitals, including TGH, have been evaluating this for quite some time.”
Despite its new iteration, AccelEQ is keeping its Tampa Bay ties. The company is a member of local innovation hub Embarc Collective, and part of the University of South Florida tech incubator, USF Connect. It is headquartered at the USF Connect Space and Fuentes wants to add five to 10 employees to the HQ by the end of this year. It is also seeking a $1.5 million seed round, which Fuentes hopes to use to continue fueling growth.
“We’re just now 100% focused on enhancing what we’ve already built out and implementing a new customer at the end of this month,” he said, “and then duplicating it 10 times over.”
