Approximately a quarter of the Swiss population that is 2.2 million people have chronic diseases, according to the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health. In Europe, over 50 million people have more than one chronic diseases. Approximately the same number of patients are dependent on multiple medications, which can be cumbersome to manage. Besides, forgetting to take medication or mixing over-the-counter with prescription medications could have fatal repercussions.
Last year, the Zurich based startup Innovation 6 AG launched the prototype of the TOM app to send reminders to patents and help them keep track of their medication and stock while ensuring data privacy. The app is easy to use: the patient can either manually enter their prescription or scan it from TOM’s data bank of over 120 000 official medications. Moreover, advanced features enable patients to consult pharmacies to obtain easy to understand information about their medications as well as reports to present to doctors during medical consultation.
From 400 to 65'000 users in 4 months
Thanks to its simplicity, the free of charge TOM app, has seen rapid growth in the number of users. Since summer this year, the number of active users has grown after the final product launch from 400 to 65000 within four months only, corresponding to over 200% organic growth. The users hail from Switzerland, Germany, France and Spain. The app sends more than 1.5 million reminders monthly, and the number is anticipated to increase as the startup expands into new regions.
In the next phase, the startup plans to scale into new countries and enhance the app with new advanced features. To achieve this goal, the company is raising a CHF 2.2 million seed financing round. Existing shareholders have already committed CHF 800’000 to the company.
Reports for the next generation of personalized health
“TOM is already performing an incredible job for our customers; however, we want to take it the next level with new features such as TOM Insights. We aim to generate enough therapies based on anonymous information provided by the users and this will enable us to build a data structure based on which we can define benchmarks and provide new kind of reports of the next generation of personalized health to the patients. Patients can also share insights from the reports with their doctors to allow them to follow their progress and better understand them”, explains Sven Beichler, Founder and CEO of Innovation 6 AG.
Alongside Sven Beichler, Innovation 6 AG has built a network of partners that support the company development in different functions. More than 26 partners across Europe are working with the company, 100% remote. Sven Beichler notes that "this is the future of the agile and highly flexible working structure for start-ups".