In 2023, Tayla Cannon moved from Australia to the U.S. for a job in a city she’d never seen before.
“No family, no friends, only a fresh start,” she told TechCrunch. A sufferer of chronic back pain, she first began working in physiotherapy, pondering it was helping make a difference within the lives of others. Yet the standard physiotherapy model never quite lit a spark in her.
She moved to interventional cardiology but only became more disillusioned
with the physical rehab model with “its localized, reactive, and volume-based nature,” she said.
Meanwhile, in her spare time, she became a content creator, sharing her perspective online about “proactive” and “holistic” ways people can do away with pain.
That took on a lifetime of its own.
She now has greater than 130,000 followers on Instagram, a company called Athletic Rebuild, which provides rehab and performance coaching for athletes, and now, a platform called Rebuildr, a HIPAA-compliant and mentorship app to assist rehab professionals run their very own businesses online, set to launch early next 12 months.
“I wasn’t attempting to construct a business; I used to be just putting my brain on the web and helping people rethink what care could appear to be.”
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Cannon and her works caught the attention of Slow Ventures, which announced on Tuesday that it invested $1.1 million as a seed round. She is certainly one of the primary creators to receive a check from Slow Ventures’ $60 million Creator Fund, which seeks to back content creators and influencers making an impact online.
Cannon said she had no plan when she began sharing her thoughts on social media in 2024 after which decided to make this her career. “There was no strategy, no roadmap, and certainty no business model behind it,” she said. She credits what most content creators do for her success — remaining authentic and sharing unfiltered but real thoughts.
Expanding a brand on social media isn’t without challenges, nevertheless. Her social media presence, and subsequently brand, was growing fast, which was good but also a problem. She was immediately faced with the necessity to grasp business logic, consumer acumen, and content strategy to attach with recent audiences. “None of which are taught in healthcare,” she continued. “We’re trained to assist people, not to construct brands.”
The turning point got here when she actually realized she was the bottleneck to her own business. “I couldn’t keep scaling something that depended solely on me. I had to construct something that would grow without me,” she said, adding that she ended up hiring people to assist her along with her projects.
She also grew her strategy when she moved from just talking about what’s broken on this planet of rehab and began working on solutions to assist fix it. Rebuildr is intended to be a “complete shift from localized reactive care to a proactive, holistic mode,” Cannon said, “combining consumer solutions, clinicians, education, and the software to deliver all of it at scale.”
She was introduced to the team at Slow Ventures through a friend who invited her to certainly one of the firm’s events in Austin. “I had zero intention of raising capital,” she said. “I wasn’t even pitching. I wasn’t even preparing a deck.” Still, she connected with Megan Lightcap, an investor at Slow, and told her about what she was constructing with Rebuildr.
“The conversation sparked something,” Cannon said, adding that Slow has helped her “imagine a version of Rebuilder that’s even larger” than what she envisioned.
Others personal trainer software on the market include TrainHeroic, Trainerize, and Everfit. Rudder hopes that her product, Rebuildr, fundamentally reshapes the rehab industry.
“I need to make high-quality rehab accessible anywhere on this planet, not limited by geography, insurance, or 30-minute appointments,” she said.