Michael Dannheim's startup started as a challenge, morphed into a research project and soon will be a fully launched company.
Dannheim took regular walks after lunch with his business partner, Thomas Gersten, who spoke often about muscles and how they react to both conscious and unconscious thoughts.
"It sounded very woo woo and I said, 'If you're so smart let's measure it," Dannheim said. "I challenged it and here I am five years later. As soon as we had the discovery — it's a solution everyone is looking for whether they know it or not."
He is now the co-founder and CEO of Sensie in Tampa, which uses smartphone sensors to track movement and muscle tension as the user reacts to thoughts and spoken words. It is available as an app and is a patented and patent-pending technology that can be licensed to wellness companies.
"Health care right now is looked through the lens of disease, but we don't have tools to measure staying healthy," Dannheim said. "We’re calling it wellness; but what does it look like to stay healthy? The outcome of our end goal is having more autonomy in their health."
The app has the user flick their wrist three times while holding their phone, which measures muscle tension. The technology measures if there is "stress" or "no stress" then takes the user through several wellness techniques. There are breathing techniques, "heart speak," which is guided through posture, and "feeling both sides," or what the user is feeling and what they want to be feeling.
"The techniques come from our partnerships with top interventionalists; typically if you work with a coach you have to pay a lot of money," Dannheim said. "But we offer them at scale because of the response to Sensie."
The company is in beta mode, which Dannheim expects to have a public launch in July. The company has seven employees and raised $600,000 from angel investors, with a seed round for $5 million expected in the future. It has partnered with London-based wellness app Love Out Loud and Barcelona-based Festival of Consciousness.
"The core premise is to learn yourself more," he said. "There seems like there are more smartphones in America than health insurance. By using a phone you can get quality care where many otherwise could not."
Dannheim is a longtime entrepreneur and current adviser at Miami-based Rise Up Ventures. Sensie is a member of Embarc Collective, and, as a Miami transplant, Dannheim believes the bet on Tampa was worth it. After scaling his company, he has even more lofty goals: going public.
"I think an IPO could happen in the next five to seven years, an initial coin offering even sooner," he said, adding an acquisition could be considered as well. "We have a team very passionate about this whole project and we think the tools of empowerment, to help people thrive, is a boundless opportunity."
