Last time we talked to the team, they were called DORA and were among the winners of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup pitching competition for their interactive physician’s assistant, a solution providing patient information before and during surgical procedures. Now, they are named ADORA, and have just won Imagine Cup Grants Program, together with three other teams from Taiwan, Ireland and Australia. In an interviewwith CEO Kristjan Košič, inventures.eu is catching up with the Slovenian startup that pushes its luck further.
Microsoft’s Imagine Cup grant programme is said to award “cash, software, and access to resources” to the winners; what does this grant represent for ADORA, concretely?
It definitely represents a confirmation of our startup and of the problem we are solving. All of the reward will be put into further product development and certifications of our solution. The grant, as we know it, is 50.000 dollars in brutto cash. We didn’t receive any detailed information about how, when and what it includes in detail. We have another interview with Microsoft scheduled later in December.
What has changed for the team and the project since we talked to you in July? Have you officially founded your company?
Our company has not yet been founded, but it will be in January 2014. However, we have been actively working on the project and on its extension, especially on the integration part with existing hospital information systems – the most important asset for communication in the hospital environment. So, the implementation is going pretty well.
We have built a product MVP that has been already tested by doctors in live operations. We got some valuable feedback that was integrated into the second iteration of our product, on which we are currently working, and which will be completed in March 2014.
A lot of work has been done on the business side and market research as well, with traveling and presenting our solution. We were also in Germany recently for the Berlin Startup Activation 2013 competition, where ADORA was selected as one of the nine finalists by EIT ICT Labs.
Apart from Microsoft’s grant, how are you financing your project?
Apart from the Microsoft grant, we are fully bootstrapped, so we are now reaching the phase where we need to scale, as we want to connect with other regional hospitals (Austria, Germany) and give them our solution for test use. To do that, we need funding, not just to develop software, but also to build actual products for these hospitals.
What’s your next step? What do you wish for 2014?
By the end of 2014, we plan to have established a strong network of regional hospitals and expert users (doctors that will actively use our solution), and of course, made a fully finalised product that can attack various markets/regions.
To sum it up, we will have an established company, a finalised product and hopefully a lot of first sales!
To learn more about ADORA, visit their website or find them on Facebook.
Thanks to Urska Renier for pointing us to this story!
