Electrokare built to optimize human health and performance
Inside the Brickyard building in Chattanooga are a couple of dozen desks with founders feverishly working to establish their first $1 million in revenue for their high-tech startups. Mitchell Leshchiner is one of those founders.
Each year, Matt Patterson and Cam Doody, the founders of Brickyard, write approximately ten $300-$500k checks to founders across the globe. The terms? Move to Chattanooga, and stay until reaching $1 million in revenue, or until the business shuts down.
Sound intense? Well, it’s that very focused, zero-distraction concept that attracted Leshchiner to the scene.
“We loved the idea of going somewhere pre-series A and building the base of the business,” he said. “Many people think you need to be in San Francisco or New York, but I think those environments are expensive and a distraction from the main point.”
Upon learning about Brickyard, Leshschiner reached out on a cold DM. He had a conversation with Patterson and Doody, and about two weeks later, found himself on a plane flying to Chattanooga to explore Brickyard.
It happened fast.
“We love the city of Chattanooga. Loved the other portfolio companies, loved the spot, loved the space. There are people from all over the world here–Matt and Cam have done a killer job,” Leshchiner said.
Optimizing human health
In early November, Teknovation reported on the public beta launch of Electrokare. The startup, co-founded by Leshchiner, launched in beta with 35,000 athletes already on the waiting list.
The lingering questions are – how did he do it? And, how does Electrokare work?
In the performance athletic space, electrolytes, HRV, strain, and water intake are crucial. They can be the differentiators between being a “good” athlete and being a “great” one.
Most wearable health devices (smart watches, strap monitors, and even smart rings) capture only surface-level data (i.e., heart rate variation, calories, temperature, and sleep tracking). Adding Electrokare’s software on top of that data can help draw out additional insights. By interpreting the ECG signal from your heart rate monitor, the platform can assess key blood values that reflect hydration, electrolyte balance, and overall readiness for performance.
For Leshchiner, the concept of a more in-depth, full-picture health software came from his experience playing pro soccer in France for a season.
“The teams collect all this health data. But I realized a lot of it is siloed. Meanwhile, players are getting all these issues like cramping, soreness, and injury,” he said. “These things start with a shift in blood chemistry, and I wanted to create something that gives athletes early warning signals before their body hits a wall.”
Building Electrokare
During Leshchiner’s college career at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he met a colleague named Joshua Malinkovich. They shared the same opinions on the opportunity for optimizing human health and performance.
Both of them were pursuing separate startups at the time.
“I told Josh that I had a lot of really personal experiences with a lot of the problems that he was solving. I had a company at the time. He had a company at the time. And, we decided to put our brains together and build this thing,” he said.
The two built a software that sits on top of the CCG signal (watch, strap, ring), and runs the data through AI and deep learning models to quantify what’s going on inside the user’s bloodstream. For example, the software could identify a shortage of potassium or calcium, indicating discomfort if not addressed.
Leshchiner and Malinkovich started the company while still in school, and began enrolling in accelerator programs across the country. For example, Electrokare was accepted into the Techstars cohort in Fort Worth, Texas. And, Leshchiner participated in another accelerator program in Boulder, Colorado.
“We jumped from Illinois to Colorado to Texas, and now we’re in Chattanooga,” Leshchiner said. “We decided to go wherever we needed to to build this business best.”
Their ultimate goal is to lean into their belief that human health-tracking can (and should) be better.
“I always fundamentally believe that health and safety are the most important things in the world,” Leshchiner said.
Their long-term vision is of a world where humans have individual and continuous monitoring of their vitals and what’s going on inside their heart, mind, and blood. Long term, Electrokare hopes to expand beyond tracking sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium to tracking the full scope of electrolytes, glucose, lactose, and cortisol.
“We want to work with patient segments – firefighters, military, astronauts, pro athletes– and have this continuous platform where they can decode their body,” Leshchiner said.
Podcasting as a marketing tool
In addition to launching a startup in the highly competitive healthtech space, Leshchiner also hosts and produces the Silicon Fox Podcast. It is a platform where Leshchiner interviews successful entrepreneurs, health and wellness leaders, and health-science personalities.
The thought process behind launching this platform was to get more connected in the health and wellness scene, establishing Leshchiner as a thought-leader in the industry.
Silicon Fox has also had some obvious benefits for Electrokare, too.
Many of the folks on the robust beta test-list came through the podcast audience, referrals, or large entity sign-ups. For example, Leshchiner was able to get a couple of colleges and universities to onboard their entire athletic department onto the beta list to test out the Electrokare app.
In the first few months of rollout, Electrokare said things are looking good, but they also see some key ways to continuously improve user experience.
You can check out the Electrokare platform here.
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