In 2023, Tayla Cannon moved from Australia to the United States 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 physical therapy, believing that it was helping to make a difference in the lives of others. Yet the traditional physical therapy model never ignited a spark in her.
She moved to interventional cardiology, but only became more disillusioned
with the physical rehab model with “its localized, reactive and volume-based nature,” she said.
Meanwhile, in her spare time, she became a content creator and shared her perspective online about “proactive” and “holistic” ways people can get rid of pain.
It took on a life of its own.
She now has more than 130,000 followers on Instagram, a company called Athletic Rebuild, which provides rehab and performance coaching for athletes, and now a platform called Rebuildr, a HIPAA-compliant mentoring app that helps rehab professionals run their own businesses online, is set to launch early next year.
“I wasn’t trying to build a business; I was just putting my brain on the Internet and helping people rethink what care could look like.”
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Cannon and her works caught the eye of Slow Ventures, which announced on 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 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 security, no business model behind it,” she said. She credits what most content creators do for her success – staying authentic and sharing unfiltered but genuine thoughts.
However, growing a brand on social media is not without its challenges. Her social media presence, and therefore brand, grew quickly, which was good, but also a problem. She was immediately confronted with the need to understand business logic, consumer acumen and content strategy to connect with new audiences. “None of them are taught in health care,” she continued. “We are trained to help people, not to build brands.”
The turning point came when she actually realized that she was the bottleneck of 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 evolved her strategy as she moved from just talking about what’s broken in the rehab world to working on solutions that can help fix it. Rebuildr is intended to be a “complete shift from localized reactive care to a proactive, holistic mode,” Cannon said, “combining consumer solutions, 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 no intention of raising capital,” she said. “I didn’t even look up. I didn’t even prepare a deck.” 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 has helped her “imagine a version of Rebuilder that’s even bigger” than she imagined.
Other personal trainer software out there include TrainHeroic, Trainerize and Everfit. Rudder hopes her product, Rebuildr, fundamentally reshapes the rehab industry.
“I want to make high-quality rehab available anywhere in the world, not limited by geography, insurance or 30-minute appointments,” she said.