D.C. startup MemoryWell Inc., which helps seniors record their life stories to improve their health care, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding to break into new areas and grow the data side of its business.
Boston’s Argon Ventures led the round, which also included participation from D.C.’s Pixel Perfect Ventures; Boston’s PBJ Capital and Bob Davoli of Gutbrain Ventures; Andy Palmer of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Koa Lab; Walnut Creek, California-based One Planet VC; Emeryville, California-based Inflect Health; and Innovations for Impact, a new fund from veteran investors Mike Dorsey and Charles Froland.
The seed round, oversubscribed from an initial $2 million target, comes on top of $1.4 million MemoryWell raised previously. That included $1 million in a 2019 angel round led by the Dolby Family, with participation from USAgainstAlzheimer’s George Vradenburg, One Medical’s Tom Lee, and Seth Rogen and Lauren Miller Rogen’s Hilarity for Charity, among others. MemoryWell then secured $300,000 in bridge funding from those investors “to get us through the initial uncertainty of Covid,” founder and CEO Jay Newton-Small said in an email. And the company took in another $100,000 from the Techstars’ Future of Longevity Accelerator in D.C., which it joined in the fall.
MemoryWell’s interactive platform allows seniors and their families to build timelines of their lives with photos, videos, letters and other elements, while connecting them with professional writers, who interview them and write the stories. They replace the intake questionnaires typically required at senior living communities, to more effectively give context to residents’ behavior that could be difficult for staff to interpret without the person’s background. The goal: to better introduce dementia patients to their caregivers and, in doing so, improve care.
The startup intends to use the capital to develop its artificial intelligence system, which predicts social determinants of health — social and economic factors that affect well-being and how patients access care, thought to account for the majority of health outcomes. MemoryWell wants to arm hospitals and other providers with data to “get ahead of these issues and prevent or forestall the outcomes,” Newton-Small said. And though it’s not a new phenomenon, “the inequities in health outcomes tied to Covid have really amplified the spotlight on this issue,” she said.
“Our stories better connect doctors and patients, and through our interview process, we can get to root causes of food insecurity, transportation and housing insecurities, and issues of trauma at scale,” said Newton-Small, who added that the company expects to do tens of thousands of stories in 2021.
To that end, MemoryWell is hiring for a handful of positions including product manager, developer, data engineer, client success manager and head of business development. The business, which has five full-time employees and four part-time workers, plans to bring on a couple more engineers later this year. That’s alongside the startup’s network of nearly 800 freelance writers and editors, and after the company acquired life story app Trib in October for an undisclosed amount to beef up its digital capabilities.
MemoryWell’s business took a hit during the pandemic when most of its business at senior living and skilled nursing facilities “evaporated overnight while providers focused on saving lives, quite understandably,” Newton-Small said. So the company shifted to other markets such as home care, palliative and hospice care, and senior living insurers — areas it’s looking to expand deeper into this year.
That work includes pilot programs with Boston’s Prospero Health and D.C.’s PCH Mutual Insurance, as well as its first pilots with hospital systems and health insurers it expects to start by the second quarter, Newton-Small said.
MemoryWell is now striving to convert those programs into long-term contracts, shooting for $500,000 in revenue for 2021 and $2.3 million for 2022, after closing 2020 with less than $100,000 on its top line.
Newton-Small, a journalist, started MemoryWell in 2016 after caring for her father with Alzheimer’s disease. When she was asked to fill out a massive questionnaire for a long-term care facility, she instead opted to write his story, “and they loved it,” Newton-Small told me in a 2019 interview. “That really transformed his care.”
Newton-Small then tapped her journalist friends to write her father’s friends’ stories, she told me previously, “and it grew from a project, slowly, into a company.”
MemoryWell, a Halcyon incubator alum from 2017, has worked with more than 40 Alzheimer’s and dementia care providers, senior living, home care, hospice and palliative care, and Medicare Advantage plans since its inception.
