Creator Tayla Cannon receives $1.1 million investment from Slow Ventures’ creator fund to build PT software | TechCrunch

In 2023, Tayla Cannon moved from Australia to the US for a job in a city she had never seen before.

“No family, no friends, just a fresh start,” she told TechCrunch. Suffering from chronic back pain, she first started working in physiotherapy because she thought it would make a difference in the lives of others. Yet the traditional physical therapy model never really ignited a spark in her.

She switched to interventional cardiology, but only became more disillusioned
with the physical rehabilitation model with “its localized, reactive and volume-based nature,” she said.

Meanwhile, she became a content creator in her spare time, sharing her views online on “proactive” and “holistic” ways for people to get rid of pain.

That took on a life of its own.

She has more than that now 130,000 followers on InstagramA company called Athletic Rebuild, which provides rehabilitation and performance coaching for athletes, and now, a platform called Rebuildr, a HIPAA-compliant mentoring app to help rehabilitation professionals run their own businesses online, launching early next year.

“I wasn’t trying to build a company; I was just putting my brain on the internet and helping people rethink what healthcare could look like.”

Cannon and her works caught the attention of Slow Ventures, which announced Tuesday that it was investing $1.1 million in a seed round. She is one of the first creators to receive a check from Slow Ventures’ $60 million Creator Fund, which supports content creators and influencers making an impact online.

Cannon said she didn’t have a plan when she started sharing her thoughts on social media in 2024 and then decided to make it a career. “There was no strategy, no roadmap and no business model behind it,” she said. She appreciates what most content creators do for her success: staying authentic and sharing unfiltered but genuine thoughts.

However, building a brand on social media is not without its challenges. Her social media presence, and therefore her brand, was growing rapidly, which was good, but also a problem. She was immediately confronted with the need to understand business logic, consumer insight and content strategy to connect with new audiences. “None of that is taught in health care,” she continued. “We are trained to help people, not to build brands.”

The turning point came when she realized that she was the bottleneck for her own company. “I couldn’t keep scaling something that depended solely on me. I had to build something that could grow without me,” she said, adding that she eventually hired people to help her with her projects.

She also developed her strategy when she went from just talking about what’s broken in the world of rehabilitation to working on solutions to fix this problem. Rebuildr is intended to be a “complete shift from localized reactive care to a proactive, holistic mode,” Cannon said, “combining consumer solutions, physicians, education and the software to deliver it all at scale.”

She was introduced to the Slow Ventures team through a friend who invited her to one of the company’s events in Austin. “I had absolutely no intention of raising capital,” she said. “I wasn’t even pitching. I wasn’t even preparing a card game.” Still, she connected with Megan Lightcap, an investor at Slow, and told her about what she was building with Rebuildr.

“The conversation sparked something,” Cannon said, adding that Slow helped her “imagine a version of Rebuilder that is even bigger” than what she envisioned.

Other personal trainer software out there is TrainHeroic, Trainerize and Everfit. Rudder hopes her product, Rebuildr, will fundamentally reshape the rehabilitation industry.

“I want to make high-quality rehabilitation accessible anywhere in the world, not limited by geography, insurance or 30-minute appointments,” she said.