Improving your mental health and well-being during your motherhood
Did you know?
• 90% of women becoming mothers experience mood disorders (loneliness, fear, anxiety, sadness, guilt…) and need a specific validation of information along their journey
• 25% of women develop severe mental health disorders (depression, psychosis, suicidal thoughts…)
• 75% of all cases are under-diagnosed and do not receive adequate treatment.
Take care to take care
Founded in 2020, Dana is a health app to improve the mental and integral health of women transitioning through motherhood, addressing the existing infra-diagnosis and lack of immediate resources a woman needs when becoming a mother. Dana is using audio-based psycho-educational content, mental and emotional self-assessment tools, combined with teleconsultation services and a collaborative mother’s community.
Once certified, Dana will become Dana Therapeutics: a data-centric AI solution based on behavioural sciences that offers advanced capabilities in prediction, detection and monitoring of patients suffering maternal mental disorders, while being able to measure the impact of the Dana intervention on each patient improvement.
Verónica and Sven have +25 years of professional experience launching start-ups and leading international companies in several countries. They both came to the conclusion that it was time to resign to start a new impact-driven venture, much more aligned with their conscious values. They met at an entrepreneur bootcamp in 2020 and decided to launch Dana a month later.
Veronica’s said: ”Having been an IVF patient, and not having been able to become a mother, I know the individual and systemic shortcomings in the journey of becoming a mother. I believe it is important to help improve them and make a positive impact on future generations.”
Industry Trends
1. Digitisation of healthcare: well-developed digital health does not imply a dehumanisation of healthcare, but rather complements it and allows more time to be spent on those who need it most.
2. Patient empowerment: informed and empowered patients; and a trend towards self-care, prevention and wellbeing, which will further catalyse this transformation of the healthcare world.
3. Integrating new technologies: Hospitals and health systems are turning to cloud computing, 5G telecommunications, artificial intelligence and the internet of things (IoT) to address current challenges and also create new models of healthcare delivery.
4. Data science: The intelligent use of patient data, big data, will also transform the way we diagnose, enable personalisation of treatments, help identify risk factors and establish potential side effects of medicines, and improve outcomes and overall productivity in the healthcare sector.
5. Telemedecine care: The home will become the usual place for routine health care and monitoring.
Dana aims to become an international benchmark digital solution for the preventive treatment of mood disorders in maternity as well as an aid to the early detection, diagnosis and monitoring of mental pathologies in maternity. All this through the integration of data processing (big data), artificial intelligence (AI) and digitisation of integrated women's health services in prevention and treatment.
3 Questions to Veronica and Sven:
1) Biggest achievements to date?
Verónica: creating high-performing teams in new environments and building profitable subsidiaries in 16 years working in multinationals in the strategy consulting industry. At the level of entrepreneurship, in the last recent 10 years, I created 3 projects with a team of promoters, highlighting Solomo365 a mobile gaming start-up with markets in Africa, China, and India, and Siovann, a start-up aimed at the beverage sector based on seawater, where she led as CEO the relationship with investors and strategic general management (financial, marketing, sales, operations).
Sven: I launched 5 companies from scratch to profit, led multinational companies, worked several years with conscious leadership principles, co-developed the conscious capitalism paradigm, achieved a “best-place to work award, is healthy, with 3 kids, and (almost) always happy!
For Dana: We developed 3 full iterations of the app with 3.000 users to date (April 2022), found the trust of investors (2 rounds closed for €280,000), received a state grant for tech start-ups (€75,000), build an ecosystem of motherhood, integral health and mental health professionals, received the social impact award from Ship2B, and received already an investment commitment of €150,000 for our next round of €1,000,000 (opening in June 2022).
2) What is the most important piece of advice you could give to CEOs starting out?
On one side: just do it.
On the other: think that reaching the right product-market fit and the right fundings will take time - most probably more time than you think. If you can, plan least 6 months more of personal fundings than what you planned - delays are more probable than speed.
3) How is a program such as Tech4Eva useful to you?
"Our objective is to accelerate the product-market fit, achieve the medical device certification and expand Dana to a second market in 2023. As an impact-driven project, based on collective intelligence, distributed and asynchronous work, a right network is key for Dana’s development. We have been looking for the right Femtech accelerator since our founding. Having participated in events of Tech4Eva back in 2021, and knowing a company from the 2021 cohort, it was quite natural for us to apply to the program. We are looking forward to the next steps with Tech4Eva!"
Follow & connect with us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dana.positivematernalhealth/?hl=es
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/athousandcolibris/
Veronica Montesinos, Co-Founder and CEO, veronica@dana.health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronicamontesinos/
Graduated in Business Administration from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a master’s degree in digital marketing from the INESDI business school, she has completed a general management (PDG) program at the prestigious IESE business school. Verónica is a professional with extensive experience in management, having held leadership positions in Spain and Austria (sales and marketing management, operations management, and general management) in multinationals and start-ups, in a variety of sectors: services, gaming, fashion, food, and beverage industry.
Dr. Sven Mulfinger, Co-Founder and CRO, sven@dana.health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/svenmulfinger/
Sven is a Life-Science engineer, with a PhD in Genetics that worked in different industries and launched 5 start-ups to date. As a serial entrepreneur, and after 10 years serving as a general manager for two Bertelsmann sub-companies in Spain, Italy and France,, it was quite natural for Sven to jump again to the unknown to find the right product-market fit to solve a societal challenge - the invisible suffering of women transitioning into motherhood. Sven is married, and a father of 3 kids and knows by first hand the consequences of mental health suffering during motherhood.