BOCAhealthcare goes into extension – campaign and founder story (part II)
Source: Prostock-studio – envato.com (edited)
The team at BOCAhealtcare GmbH would like to thank you for all the investments you have already made and the trust you have placed in us. Over € 50,000 has already been invested in the first eight weeks of our financing campaign. We have not quite reached the € 100,000 funding threshold yet, but we still firmly believe that we can break this hurdle. That is why we decided to extend the campaign.
We would be delighted if you continued to closely monitor and support our campaign.
Last week we reported here on the beginnings of BOCAhealthcare – the personal motivation and the emergence of the corporate idea. In the second part of the series, co-founder and CEO Alessandro Faragli explains how the team was assembled step by step and how it came about that six Italians without any special connection to Germany chose Berlin as the location to start their company.
With the determination to turn our idea into reality, Edoardo and I started research in 2017 and continued to develop the product idea until we reached our first major milestone: the filing of the first national patent. This can currently be found in the exam for international expansion. Despite the successes so far, we both quickly realized that our work on the product was limited to our medical specialties. From a certain point, my previous work and experience for the start-up d-heartcare.com did not help far enough. We quickly realized that we needed a powerful team to technically develop the product and build a successful company.
The first thing we were able to gain was a key figure: Lorenzo Estienne, my best friend’s cousin, is a software developer and analyst. He succeeded in connecting the core of what would later become the BOCAhealth system, the software based on machine learning, to the hardware. Davide Bianchi followed a little later: As an electronics engineer and expert in bioimpedance analysis with a doctorate on the same subject at the Milan Politecnico and MIT in Boston, he appeared to us to be the perfect addition and predestined to physically bring the new BOCAhealth hardware to life,
Now only two finance and sales experts were missing to complete the team: We brought in Marco Mezzadra and Salvatore Aristarco. First business developer and project manager who previously worked at Deloitte in Milan. The latter is a business and marketing expert with previous experience as managing director of the Nolarma Group based in Lugano.
So a powerful team was ready to cause a stir with our idea in the metropolises of Italy. Not correct! Because Italy should not be the seat of the newly founded company, but Berlin. But why did we six Italians, without any connection to Germany, decide to take this step?
Start-up hub Berlin
Berlin is one of the best and most productive start-up ecosystems in Europe. Without this, we might not be where we are today. At the time, I was the first member of the team to move to Berlin in 2017 because I signed a contract as a research assistant at the Experimental Cardiological Laboratory at the Charité University in Berlin. Marco followed in 2018. During these years BOCAhealth was included in the mentoring program for medical innovations from Spark Berlin, looked after by the Startup Bootcamp Digital Health Berlin and was used by 176 applicants from 40 countries for the B. Braun Acceleratorselected. All this interest made it possible to found the company in Berlin and we do not regret having chosen this path.
In Berlin, too, we see ourselves well equipped for the future to bring the product and the company to success. Soon after successfully completing the financing round on aescuvest, we can tackle important processes such as CE certification.