Editor’s note: Welcome to The Pitch, a DC Inno special feature in which we spotlight young local startups led by underrepresented founders. These companies may not have much (or any) funding or revenue, but they do have plans — and they’re taking the initial steps to make things happen. Each month, we’ll highlight a different venture in the D.C.-area landscape, with an intention of following their journeys from this point forward. This is the fourth installment. Previously we have featured CarpeDM, Old Dominion Flower Co. and Acclinate.
Ashley Yesayan’s life changed with a breast cancer diagnosis at age 35.
“On a day just like any other day, I was told that I had an advanced and incurable cancer that might kill me over the next two to five years; that if I didn’t die, I would never be able to have the biological children I had longed for, I would have body parts removed, and that all my hair was going to fall out,” she recalls.
She immediately experienced “a period of extreme isolation and fear,” she said, but soon found tools that connected her with others and prepared her for the journey. And that, she said, helped in her recovery.
The local entrepreneur beat her cancer — and left her job in venture capital to create OneVillage, her D.C. startup that’s now emerging from stealth mode to fill what she sees as a hole in the market.
“I believe that no one needs to feel alone during their journey with cancer, or any other chronic illness,” she says, adding that “it was my responsibility to give a voice to this underserved community.”
The pitch: The D.C. company offers a set of free online tools to cancer patients and their loved ones — to share health updates, meet other people and give friends and family easy ways to help. The platform includes a personalized homepage, Care Calendar (to track treatment schedules and appointments) and Wishlist (think: wedding registry, but with gift certificates for house cleaning, meal delivery, dog walking and transportation).
The team: Ashley Yesayan is founder and CEO of OneVillage. The South Carolina native dove into entrepreneurship after a 15-year career as a venture capital investor backing companies including McLean’s Alarm.com, Richmond’s TemperPack Technologies, D.C.’s Optoro and Fairfax’s CustomInk — most recently as a vice president at Revolution Growth. Now with three employees at OneVillage, she said she’s “looking to significantly scale up” the executive leadership team and hire for roles including business development lead, community manager, head of product, head of marketing and in-house developers.
The business model: OneVillage is free to patients and their networks, and generates revenue from its WishList and marketplace, earning a commission from vendors on goods sold through the platform. But the company plans to develop a fintech tool that would facilitate donations toward medical bills, wigs or other patient needs to offset costs associated with travel for medical procedures, second opinions or clinical trials. “Going forward, we expect this platform to be our primary revenue driver,” Yesayan said. Think GoFundMe, but sans the fee to users and within the OneVillage site.
The competition: The company competes with the likes of Boise, Idaho-based telehealth startup Jasper Health; New York e-commerce platform Alula; Boston caregiver app Ianacare; and Eagan, Minnesota-based nonprofit CaringBridge. A OneVillage survey of more than 200 patients and caregivers found that about 10% use Google Calendar to organize their appointments and care-related communications. But Yesayan’s company, she said, is the only platform “built exclusively to help with care for the non-medical needs of cancer patients and their families.”
The challenge: OneVillage has “clearly demonstrated the need” for the platform, Yesayan said, based on both speaking with users and her own experience with cancer. But as a nontechnical founder, she said, “standing up our product organization has unquestionably been the biggest challenge we’ve faced, and the biggest obstacles to getting our product into the hands of people who need it.” So expanding her team with several C-level roles to support marketing and development should help, she said.
The game plan: OneVillage closed a $1.5 million funding round in April, led by New York’s Third Prime and Boulder, Colorado-based seed accelerator Techstars. Other investors included CustomInk co-founder Marc Katz, Gula Tech Adventures founders Ron and Cyndi Gula, Get Well Network founder Michael O'Neil and others. That funding will allow the business to build out the fintech component of its platform, based on feedback from users. Long term, OneVillage plans to expand beyond cancer to other chronic illnesses — from heart attack and stroke to Multiple Sclerosis and Lyme disease.
