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,” he told TechCrunch. Having suffered from chronic back pain, she first started working in physiotherapy, believing she was helping to make a difference in the lives of others. However, the traditional model of physiotherapy never ignited a spark for her.
He moved into interventional cardiology but became more frustrated with the physical rehab model with “its localized, reactive and volume-based nature,” he said.
Meanwhile, in her spare time, she became a content creator, sharing her insight online about “preventive” and “holistic” ways people can get rid of pain.
This took on a life of its own.
Now it has more than 130,000 followers on Instagrama company called Athletic Rebuild, that provides detox and performance coaching for athletes, and now, a platform called Rebuildr, A HIPAA-compliant app and guidance to help rehabilitation professionals run their own businesses online, launching early next year.
“I wasn’t trying to build a business, I was just putting my mind to the Internet and helping people rethink what care could look like.”
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Cannon and her projects caught the eye of Slow Ventures, which announced Tuesday that it invested $1.1 million as a seed round. He is one of the first creators to receive a check from Slow Ventures’ $60 million Creator Fund, which seeks to support content creators and influencers making an impact online.
Cannon said she had no plan when she started sharing her thoughts on social media in 2024 and then decided to make this her profession. “There was no strategy, no roadmap and certainly no business model behind it,” he said. She credits what most content creators do to her success — staying authentic and sharing unfiltered but genuine thoughts.
However, expanding a brand on social media is not without its challenges. Her social media presence, and thus her brand, was growing rapidly, which was both a good thing and a problem. He immediately faced the need to understand business logic, consumer acumen and content strategy to connect with new audiences. “None of that is taught in health care,” he continued. “We’re trained to help people, not build brands.”
The turning point came when she realized she was the bottleneck in her own business. “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 ended up hiring people to help her with her projects.
She also increased her strategy when she moved away from just talking about what’s broken in the recovery world and started working on solutions to fix it. Rebuildr is intended to be a “complete shift from local reactive care to a proactive, holistic operation,” Cannon said, “combining solutions for consumers, clinicians, education and the software to deliver it all at scale.”
She was introduced to the team at Slow Ventures through a friend who invited her to one of the company’s events in Austin. “I had zero intention of raising funds,” he said. “I didn’t even put. I didn’t even prepare a deck.” However, he connected with Megan Lightcap, an investor in Slow, and told her what he was building with Rebuildr.
“The conversation sparked something,” Cannon said, adding that Slow helped her “imagine a version of Rebuilder that’s even bigger” than she envisioned.
Other personal trainer software out there include TrainHeroic, Trainerize, and Everfit. Rudder hopes her product, Rebuildr, will fundamentally reshape the addiction industry.
“I want to make high-quality rehabilitation accessible anywhere in the world, not limited by geography, insurance or 30-minute appointments,” he said.
