Boon VR

How do I describe Ridhima Parvathaneni? She is the kickass  founder disrupting healthcare with VR. We recently sat down to chat with her and learn more about what she and her team are up to at BoonVR. What we found is an investment opportunity we think is poised for tremendous upside.

For as long as Ridhima can remember, she has been drawn to tech because of its ability to, “affect millions of people and have a huge societal impact, when done right.” For context, Ridhima has already founded, The Seaways Free Trade Zone, which produces over $4M in annual revenue. It’s mission you ask? To provide better access to pharmaceuticals and medical devices to the people of India.

But she saw even more opportunity to spur societal  impact, by applying technology to the medical space. On a trip to the US in search of her next business idea, Ridhima explored robots and different tech before stumbling upon VR. When she learned more about VR, she realized it, “had this incredible sense of presence,” like nothing she had ever seen before. It became clear that the ability for VR to, “allow people to go somewhere in a photorealistic way,” presented a huge opportunity based on the current state of tech.

The immersive ability of VR kept drawing Ridhima in as she grew up in a family of doctors that often discussed the training videos they utilized to learn about new medical devices. With her knowledge of the training gap that existed, she decided to find a way to provide a VR based solution that could help improve medical outcomes through better training experiences.

It’s pretty clear that Ridhima is a mission driven founder, and her early investors Ben Brasher of Blacktop Capital, couldn’t agree more. When we spoke with him he said, “We invest in founders who are driven to make the world better and Ridhima has the business experience to help Boon do just that.”

Ridhima speaks a lot about the training gap that exist in the medical device space. But we learned that those words carry great weight. Put simply, “In the U.S. alone 700 people die a day because of preventable medical errors.” When you put the problem in the context of people dying on a daily basis, it begins to position the great need for better training solutions.

In a year, that would mean 255,500 lives are at risk due in part to poor training services. From a market size perspective, medical device companies spend $1.4 billion on a yearly basis to try and train doctors to the best of their abilities using 2 dimensional videos.

“BoonVR is a learning management system that uses virtual reality (VR) as an immersive tech driven training experience–that helps to solve the global crisis of poor medical training. With Boon VR, surgeons can train spatially, at scale, with natural voice based interactions and gaze navigation. It transports the doctor to different real time training environments and supplies rich analytics back to the device company on these training sessions. .”

The main BoonVR application right now is for new and complicated, “Cardiothoracic related, and neurosurgical devices,” because, “new surgeries are very complicated and require a lot of learning on the part of the surgeons.” The team has also found that this solution works good for, “getting doctors to shift to new devices by easing the learning curve, and reducing the anxiety of using a new device.”

Early investor Ben Brasher feels that, “by shortening and improving the training cycle, life-saving medical devices will find their way to patients sooner and disastrous medical errors will be reduced. BoonVR proves that VR is about so much more than gaming and entertainment.”

During the company’s market validation phase they, “had real surgeries filmed internally and deployed in VR to show top surgeons and med device executives,” and the feedback was astoundingly positive. In one study, “over 90% of Cardiothoracic surgeons said VR training was more effective than video,” because it gets rid of the, “physical limitations of 2 dimensions, where doctors can’t see what a nurse on the right hand side is doing, or an anesthesiologist on the left hand side is doing.”

Analysis written by Chris Lustrino on April 24, 2018.