In 2023, Tayla Cannon moved from Australia to the United States to work in a city she had never seen before.
“No family, no friends, just a new beginning,” he told TechCrunch. He suffered from chronic back pain and began working in physical therapy, thinking he was helping to make a difference in the lives of others. However, the traditional physical therapy model never lit a spark in her.
He switched to interventional cardiology, but became even more disillusioned.
with the physical rehabilitation model with “its localized, reactive and volume-based nature,” he said.
Meanwhile, in her free time, she became a content creator and shared her perspective online on “proactive” and “holistic” ways people can get rid of pain.
That took on a life of its own.
She is now over 130,000 followers on Instagramto company called Athletic Rebuild, which provides rehabilitation and performance training for athletes, and now, a platform called Rebuildr, a HIPAA-compliant mentoring app to help rehab professionals run their own online businesses, launching 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 be.”
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Cannon and his works caught the attention of Slow Ventures, which announced Tuesday that it had invested $1.1 million as a seed round. She is one of the first creators to receive a check from Slow Ventures’ $60 million Creator Fund, which seeks to back content creators and influencers making an impact online.
Cannon said he didn’t have any plans when he started sharing his thoughts on social media in 2024 and then decided to make this his profession. “There was no strategy, no roadmap, no certainty, no business model behind this,” he said. She attributes her success to what most content creators do: staying authentic and sharing genuine but unfiltered thoughts.
However, expanding a brand on social media is not without its challenges. Their social media presence, and therefore their brand, was growing rapidly, which was good but also a problem. He was immediately faced with the need to understand business logic, consumer awareness, and content strategy to connect with new audiences. “None of which are taught in healthcare,” he continued. “We are trained to help people, not to build brands.”
The turning point came when she realized that she was the bottleneck in her own business. “I couldn’t continue to scale 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.
He also improved his strategy when he stopped just talking about what’s not working in the world of rehab and started working on solutions to help fix it. Rebuildr aims to be a “complete shift from localized reactive care to a proactive, holistic mode,” Cannon said, “combining consumer, medical, education and software solutions to deliver it all at scale.”
She met the Slow Ventures team through a friend who invited her to one of the company’s events in Austin. “I had no intention of raising capital,” he said. “I wasn’t even throwing. I wasn’t even preparing a deck.” Still, he contacted Megan Lightcap, a Slow investor, and told her what he was building with Rebuildr.
“The conversation sparked something,” Cannon said, adding that Slow helped her “imagine a version of Rebuilder that’s even bigger” than she imagined.
Other personal trainer programs out there include TrainHeroic, Trainerize, and Everfit. Rudder hopes his product, Rebuildr, will fundamentally change the rehabilitation industry.
“I want to make high-quality rehab accessible anywhere in the world, without being limited by geography, insurance or 30-minute appointments,” she said.
