BIA Startup Stories - Glaice

Our interview series Startup Stories features founders from our Future Health and Future City Accelerators. This edition showcases Leonard Rinser and Michelle Torres-Linke, co-founders of Glaice. 🚀

What are you working on?

We empower people with diabetes towards sustainable health by enabling them to understand their body reactions and make informed decisions. Through this, we reduce the risk of secondary diseases and increase their quality of life.

What is your killer value proposition and who are you building it for?

GLAICE provides actionable education and tailored advice to people with diabetes so they can make empowered and informed decisions. It does so by correlating medical research findings and guidelines with the individual needs and metabolism of each patient. To do this, GLAICE analyzes the user’s real time health and personal data to deliver education and advice with only the most relevant information. This gives patients the assistance they need to improve their disease management, reduce the risk of secondary diseases, and improve their quality of life.

The first proof of concept for GLAICE’s vision is tailored exercise assistance for people with insulin-dependent diabetes. Although physical activity is essential for improving overall life and health, the disease makes exercise challenging and even harmful by disrupting important bodily functions. We integrated our algorithm into a mobile app that enables safe and easy physical activity by providing the necessary educational content and advice based on proven medical guidelines and tailored to the health and user data we collect.

Why does this matter, and why are you the right team to drive this forward?

Diabetes is a huge problem, and the number of people affected is rising steadily and rapidly. Affected individuals are completely overwhelmed in dealing with the complexity, and solutions are needed that empower people to take their health into their own hands.

To describe what we are doing about it, it comes down to three things, developing empowering and patient-centric eHealth tools that are joyful and have a relevant scientific-medical baseline. GLAICE helps people get into the driver’s seat and enables them to make informed decisions. By doing so, we not only support the patients in being less overwhelmed by an information overload, but also the physicians in their daily work to reduce the time per patient and create a more personalized therapy. 

Our highly diverse team has core competencies in MedTech, having worked at Siemens Healthineers, Medtronic, Fraunhofer, Inveox, Pari, and the TU Munich Venture Labs Healthcare, as well as in software development from working at FAANG companies. For about 1.5 years, we have developed and worked on our user-centric design skills at the UnternehmerTUM in Munich, where we also met as a team.

Thanks to our advisors and medical partners, who are leading researchers in the area of metabolism and diabetes like Dr. Othmar Moser, Dr. Ulrike Becker, and Dr. Meinolf Behrens, our solutions have a strong medical and scientific basis.

What is on your plate for the next 6 months?

We are currently in our clinical trial with Imperial College London, the University of Bayreuth, and the Medical University of Graz to prove that our solution helps users foster better blood sugar levels during exercise. Additionally, we are building up a community around our brand that already consists of 150 people. In the next 6 months, we want to further scale our solution in order to be market ready and start the certification process.

Share with the audience a particular moment that inspired you during the Future Health Accelerator. 

One of the moments that inspired us the most in our journey through the Future Health Accelerator program was the focus on combining creating value in healthcare with a sustainable business model and bringing together the right experts for those topics, like Dr. Arndt Schwaiger in metrics-based business models and health-tech entrepreneurs like Farina Schurzberg, to iterate and optimize our current solution and shape the vision and strategy to get there.

Would you like to share anything else?

We are always looking for people to test and co-develop our solution with us, experts in the field of digital health to further challenge and develop our business model, and scientists as well as medical doctors to develop our next features. Last but not least, we are looking for outstanding digital health entrepreneurs for our advisory board and as potential business angels. Please reach out to us here. 

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BIA is a boutique agency developing innovation, transformation, and learning journeys for corporates, startups, and scaleups. Our pre-seed startup accelerators are our special impact initiatives, supporting ambitious entrepreneurs working to disrupt the future of urban life, health, and technology. Our programs are backed by the Berlin Senate and the European Social Fund.