Creator Tayla Cannon receives $1.1 million investment from Slow Ventures’ Creator Fund to build PT software

In 2023, Tayla Cannon moves from Australia to the United States for a job in a city she has never seen before.

“No family, no friends, just a fresh start,” she told TechCrunch. Suffering from chronic back pain, she began working in physical therapy, believing she could help make a difference in the lives of others. However, the traditional physical therapy model never ignited a spark within her.

She moved on to interventional cardiology but became more disillusioned
The physical rehabilitation model is “local, interactive and volume-based in nature,” she said.

Meanwhile, in her spare time, she has become a content creator, sharing her perspective online on “proactive” and “holistic” ways people can get rid of pain.

It took on a life of its own.

She now has more than 130,000 followers on Instagram, a company called Athletic Rebuild, which provides rehabilitation and performance coaching to athletes, and now, a platform called Rebuildr, a HIPAA-compliant, mentoring app to help rehabilitation professionals run their own businesses online, is scheduled to launch early next year.

“I wasn’t trying to build a business; I was just putting my mind online and helping people rethink what care could look like.”

Cannon and its business have caught the attention of Slow Ventures, which announced Tuesday that it has invested $1.1 million in a seed round. She’s one of the first creators to receive a check from Slow Ventures’ $60 million Creator Fund, which seeks to support creators and influencers making an impact online.

Cannon said she didn’t have a plan when she started sharing her thoughts on social media in 2024 and then decided to make it her career. “There was no strategy, no roadmap, and no certainty behind it, a business model,” she said. She credits what most content creators do for her success, which is staying authentic and sharing real, unfiltered ideas.

However, expanding a brand on social media is not without challenges. Her social media presence, and thus her brand, was growing rapidly, which was a good thing but also a problem. I was immediately faced with the need to understand business logic, consumer acumen, and content strategy to connect with new audiences. “None of it is taught in health care,” she continued. “We are trained to help people, not to build brands.”

The turning point came when she actually realized that she was a bottleneck in her own business. “I couldn’t continue to scale something that depended on me alone. I had to build something that could grow without me,” she said, adding that she eventually hired people to help her with her projects.

She also developed her strategy when she moved from just talking about what was broken in the rehab world and started working on solutions to help fix it. Rebuildr is intended to be “a complete shift from reactive, local care to a proactive, comprehensive mode, bringing together consumer, physician, education and software solutions to deliver it all at scale,” Cannon said.

She was introduced to the Slow Ventures team through a friend who invited her to a company event in Austin. “I had no intention of raising capital,” she said. “I wasn’t even promoting. I wasn’t even preparing the deck.” However, she reached out to Megan Lightcap, an investor at Slow, and told her about what she was building with Rebuildr.

“The conversation sparked something,” Cannon said, adding that Slow helped her “imagine a bigger version of Rebuilder” than she had envisioned.

Other personal trainer programs include TrainHeroic, Trainerize, and Everfit. Ruder hopes her product, Rebuildr, will fundamentally reshape the rehabilitation industry.

“I want to make high-quality rehabilitation available anywhere in the world, not limited by geography, insurance or 30-minute appointments,” she said.