Markus Wilhelms, CEO of Mowoot: “Thanks to d·HEALTH Barcelona we detected the big unmet need our product is solving”
Markus Wilhelms, Marc Benet, Immaculada gerrero and Angel Calzada, founders of Mowoot and former fellows of d·HEALTH Barcelona.
usMIMA (commercialy known as Mowoot) is a healthcare start-up emerged from Design Health Barcelona (d·HEALTH Barcelona), the biodesign postgraduate program promoted by Biocat to train future innovators and entrepreneurs in the healthcare sector. Mowoot has developed a medical device that automates the abdominal massage to address chronic constipation. The result is a non-pharmacological, non-invasive and no-side-effect solution that improve the quality of life of patients suffering constipation because of medication, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury or other conditions. Markus Wilhelms, PhD, CEO of Mowoot and alumni of d·HEALTH Barcelona, tells us about the past, present and future of the company.
How did d·HEALTH Barcelona help you create your own company?
Our team met during the program: all of us were fellows at d·HEALTH Barcelona: Inmaculada Herrero and me (biologists), Marc Benet (product designer) and Angel Calzada (engineer). During the d·HEALTH program our team detected an important unmet clinical need while we were in immersion in the neurorehabilitation hospital Institut Guttmann. After detecting the need and really understanding it thanks to the methodologies that we learned in the d·HEALTH Barcelona program, we decided to really create the product, create the company and bring the solution close to the patient to help improve their quality of life.
Which need did you detect during the clinical immersion of d·HEALTH Barcelona?
Up to 24% of the general population suffer from chronic constipation, specially people with movement restrictions due to neurological disorders like spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis or Parkison, or the elderly. We detected that there was a need for non-pharmacological non-invasive solution and found a type of colon-specific abdominal massage that is this kind of solution that people are looking for. The only drawback was that you have to apply it 10 minutes once a day and most people don’t have access to a Physiotherapist on a daily basis. So we decided to automate this treatment and this is how we created Mowoot. It’s the first intermittent colonic exo-peristalsis device on the market, a solution without side effects for chronic constipation.
How has Mowoot company evolved since you finished the d·HEALTH Barcelona program?
Our team met during the d·HEALTH Barcelona program in 2014. We created the company, about 8 months after we emerged out of the program. Ever since then we have developed our product, evaluated it with a lot of customer development and over 1 thousand interviews. CE certified did our clinic trials to show that we really have a good solution that works, and we are on the market since 2017. Right now, we are in the scale-up phase we are not a start-up any more, we are a scale up and that means we are going to international markets and apply what we learned in the last 4 years. Our next big milestone is getting into public healthcare reimbursement in Germany which is 40% of the European medical device market, and to achieve more acceleration speed we are about to raise our Series A round early next year.
How does the Mowoot device work?
The Mowoot belt is designed to be really easy to put on even for people with movement restrictions. You just put it at waist height and close it with the Velcro. Once you got the belt on, you just connect the tubes to the desktop device and you can start the treatment. You have to decide on the treatment duration, we recommend 10–20 minutes depending on the severity of the constipation and then you press “Play”. The rest of the treatment will be automatically generated and supervised by the device.
What did you learn in the d·HEALTH Barcelona program?
Our founder team met in the d·HEALTH Barcelona program. We detected the big unmet need that our product is solving -chronic constipation- and most importantly of all we learned the techniques that are important to keep having this contact to the market that allows you to agile, adapt to all the challenges that you face in the start-up phase which are many and plenty. Another important thing we learned in the d·HEALTH Barcelona program is how to manage different characters within the team so it’s a great and important thing that you have a multidisciplinary team which adds a lot of value, but also there’s challenges to that because everybody has their own background, own language, own values, and this is something that has to be managed and it’s a big challenge and if you do it right it’s a big value added to the project.
d·HEALTH Barcelona is an innovation fellowship of EIT Health. How has EIT Health helped your company evolve after the program?
EIT Health is an important partner to have when you are starting up, because there’s a lot of acceleration and a lot of knowledge, it’s a big important network. After finishing d·HEALTH Barcelona we were fortunate enough to be part of programs like Go Global where you learn how to scale up on international level, Bridgehead where you really start to put in what you learned into action. We won awards from EIT Health like the European Health Catapult that really helps to draw visibility to the project and also to find investors. It is really important that there is something like EIT Health out there where entrepreneurs that work a lot and do a lot have the support of the professional network to facilitate this acceleration and scale up process that is so important.
If you have background in Life Sciences, Engineering, Business and Design and you want to follow Markus Wilhelms’steps, Biocat has open the selection for students of its 7th Design Health Barcelona (d·HEALTH Barcelona) edition, a postgraduate program to develop innovators and entrepreneurs in the healthcare sector, with starting date in January, 2020. The 95% of the previous editions participants have found a job in the healthcare sector and 30% of them started their own business project. Following the Stanford biodesign methodology, participants experience a full cycle of innovation. The fellows divide into multidisciplinary teams and do a two-month clinical immersion in top hospitals in Barcelona to detect real unmet clinical needs on site that can be the basis for creating new products or services. More info: http://dhealthbcn.moebio.org
