PhyxUp Health Inc., an early-stage digital healthcare startup from South Korea, plans to close a pre-seed funding round soon, said the company’s founder and chief executive, who also expects to see a more than 10-fold increase in clients for its patient management program in the United States in its first year of operation.
“Several investors have agreed to invest in the pre-seed funding, which was scheduled to close in mid-June,” Fix Up Health founder and CEO Lim Sang-won said in an interview with The Korea Economic Daily on Monday.
Rabbit Ventures and Digital Healthcare Partners have already signed investment agreements, and another undisclosed investor is in final negotiations with FixUp to close an investment agreement, she said.
PhyxUp, founded in September 2023, has developed a remote monitoring program for physical therapists and offers it as software as a service (SaaS) for a subscription fee of $4,800 per clinic per year.
It is a type of teletherapy monitoring (RTM) that refers to the delivery of therapeutic patient care remotely. RTM treatment is based on direct supervision by a qualified practitioner, such as a physical therapist, during a virtual check-in. It is being actively promoted in the United States to better meet the growing demand for remote rehabilitation.
“When I worked as a physiotherapist in the United States for about nine years, I noticed that many patients did not follow the home exercise regimen written on paper,” Lim said.
“Without home exercises, patients’ recovery stagnates and their pain may worsen, which is a huge blow to therapists. To improve patient outcomes, I decided to develop the PhyxUp software.”
More than just RTM
PhyxUp, which will be launched in the US market in August, is a comprehensive patient management program that provides physical therapists with easy tracking and monitoring tools for patient outcomes as well as simplified billing and reimbursement services.
Physiotherapists can monitor and manage patient adherence and progress through automated pain and HEP data transfer and handle billing through PhyxUp’s web-based monitoring dashboard, while patients can access their home exercise programs on the PhyxUp app.
To motivate patients to exercise at home, PhyxUp produces original home exercise videos tailored to different injuries, Lim said.
“Our software is more than just RTM. PhyxUp saves physiotherapists’ time (patient management and billing) and improves patient outcomes with high-quality exercise videos,” said Lim.
The company plans to use the pre-seed funding to add more at-home exercise videos and upgrade its product.
In particular, they plan to add gamification and in-app community features to further increase patient engagement and progress, and PhyxUp hopes to release an upgraded second version with these features next summer, Lim said.
5 to 66 people per year
After testing its minimum viable product (MVP) at a physical therapy clinic in the United States, the South Korean digital healthcare startup has secured orders for the program from five clinics on the East Coast.
“Our goal is to serve 66 clinics in California by 2025 and to be in every state in the U.S. by 2027,” Lim said.
PhyxUp is also looking at other markets, such as Canada, Europe and Australia, where digital healthcare is covered by insurance and actively promoted by governments.
The related market is expected to grow in line with increasing global demand.
According to Precedence Research, the global telerehabilitation market is projected to grow from $3.58 billion in 2023 to $12.9 billion by 2032.
According to Databridge Market Research, the global remote rehabilitation monitoring market is also expected to grow from $1.4 billion to $4.7 billion during the same period.
The remote monitoring market is still in its early stages and has great potential for growth, Lim said.
“I have witnessed my business progress. The company has grown compared to three months ago, six months ago,” Lim said.
“With value-added features carefully selected based on the real-world experience of physiotherapists, we are confident in the quality of the PhyxUp service, which stands out among the products our engineers have developed.”
Lim is not only a physiotherapist, but also an epidemiologist and clinical data analyst, and some of her former medical colleagues in the United States are working closely with her on the program as advisers.
FixUp is also partnering with medical research centres in the US to improve its products, Lim said.
Earlier this year, PhyxUp was selected as one of 20 Korean startups to benefit from Asan Voyager, a program designed to support Korean startups expanding into the US by providing acceleration, coaching, community learning and long-term residency support.
Write Seo Su-kyung (skseo@hankyung.com)
This article was edited by Jennifer Nicholson Breen.
