I was introduced to Tanya Colonna, CEO and Co-founder of Oro Muscles by Mike Cremeans, who has deep experience working with life sciences companies through Project Medtech. Mike met Tanya at a Project Medtech conference and thought Oro Muscles was a good fit for VisionTech. After meeting with Tanya and learning how Oro Muscles is tapping into muscle intelligence to transform physical rehab of elite athletes and others, I agreed. Oro Muscles has a waitlist for its AI-supported technology and is raising funds to accelerate traction within professional sports while preparing to launch in healthcare settings. Oro Muscles is a unique investment opportunity and I’m pleased Tanya agreed to pitch on March 19. I will also have a due diligence report to share by then. Here’s my preview.
BP: Tell me a little about you and how you got started with Oro Muscles.
TC: My co-founder Hobey Tam and I are both graduates of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. We had a hypothesis around using sensors to gather muscle intelligence to improve physical therapy processes – current standards focus on what is performed. We didn’t find anything on the market to monitor how exercises are performed. We hypothesized this was the root of inefficiencies.
We needed data for the software to prove this. After struggling for over a year in the U.S. to gather this data, we determined it would be much easier to test our idea and gather data in the Netherlands than the U.S., which is more heavily regulated. We were right; we quickly found pilot sites for on an ACL study with top physical therapists and for performance testing with the Dutch Olympic speed skating team starting in 2019, after which we began to gain market traction with diverse pilot sites.
For a total of eight years, Hobey and I put sweat equity into our startup idea, both of us teaching at universities in the U.S. and Netherlands to fund our research and development. Ultimately, we worked with more 100 experts in rehab and analyzed data on 2,700-plus sessions. In 2023, we formally launched Oro Muscles, Inc.
BP: What pain points did you see in the market that you believed you could solve?
TC: Our goal with Oro Muscles is to revolutionize rehabilitation with real-time, actionable muscle insights with live biofeedback and instant analysis. Among the pain points we identified was that a whole lot of data is thrown at rehab clinicians, but there was no insight into what was going on within the muscles themselves. The external metrics might say an athlete was healed and cleared to play or a person was OK to return to work, but significant re-injury rates indicated a missing piece in the performance puzzle. Once we were able to measure the muscles with our device, the amount of inefficiencies identified were alarming. The traditional rehab process is time consuming, costly, inefficient, not entirely effective, and disappointing to athletes and patients. We transform this wasted time and effort into results with real-time, actionable muscle insights. It’s making a huge impact.
BP: In a nutshell, describe your offering.
TC: What Oro Muscles does is put a modern twist on 60-year-old technology. Oro Muscles uses AI technology to instantly provide a reliable, repeatable, valid, and actionable display of muscle data. This instant display allows practitioners to minimize guesswork and decrease the margin of error in physiotherapy. It gives them the missing piece in the performance puzzle that had been out of reach. With our muscle sensors and clinically validated AI-powered software, we give athletic trainers and clinicians the ability in each live session to optimize each movement, make programming adjustments, develop a true mind-muscle connection, and understand patient limits. Doing this we have saved time on therapy, decreased time to treat, returned athletes and people to work and normal activities more quickly, and reduced costs while increasing revenue. It’s a win for patients, teams, clinicians, insurance companies, and employers.
BP: How are you using AI?
TC: We’re currently using AI and machine learning to eliminate the need for monotonous manual analysis and to display easily actionable data. Manually analyzing 15 minutes of data captured during a physiotherapy session takes about three weeks. This first use of AI opens the market for muscle data by more than 100x. We take technology that was confined to research use and turn it into an impactful clinical tool. Our AI performs the analysis in real time, displaying data on a screen that’s interpretable and can be applied immediately. Our next step is to incorporate generative AI.
BP: What is your revenue model?
TC: SaaS hardware and software integration. We offer a paid trial of the sensor hardware and software. At the end, the customer can opt-in and the full subscription. As of today, our conversion rate is 100% from trial to full subscription. We have a 40% plus upsell rate after that.
BP: Your beach head is elite professional sports in US and EU. Explain why.
TC: Pro sports are a funny business. They are less regulated than clinical settings, which makes them more open to trying things. However, they are budget conscious; the big spending is on fan engagement and not physiotherapy of athletes. However, if your tech works, the word spreads and more teams want to use your product. If you can say a big athlete was back on the field in two weeks rather than six, that news is going to spread. If you see Inter Milan using Oro Muscles and getting great results, you want it, too. Oro Muscles is now used by Major League Baseball (MLB), the Major League Soccer (MLS), European soccer teams, Division 1 colleges, elite cycling teams, and rehabilitation clinics- NBA and NFL teams are in our pipeline.
BP: What next?
TC: We have multiple market opportunities. This year we’ll continue to scale our elite sports sales and begin to trial our clinical solution with the goal of closing one major healthcare deal in 2025. There’s a lot of interest in Oro Muscles on the clinical side for orthopedic injuries and joint replacements, movement disorders, chronic pain, and workers comp injuries. We have some milestones to meet such as FDA filing for our software’s threshold lines, clinical trials, and integration with electronic medical systems, but our current MVP is scalable in elite sport and clinic early adopters to ensure continued revenue momentum and decreased risk for future trials. We do have existing CPT codes – and a pipeline of potential healthcare customers.
BP: There seems to be a number of competitors in this space. How are you different?
TC: We do have competitors, but Oro is the only one delivering muscle intelligence based on deep, medical grade muscle data. Our outputs are safe, actionable, and in real time so trainers and physiotherapists can react and adjust while in a session with an athlete or patient. Oro Muscles has a short learning curve, so our technology is easy to put into practice. On top of that, we’re the only company on the market with results and speed into the market. Our pilot clinic added $36,000 to its annual revenue and doubled his patient volume due to the time saved using Oro.
BP: Do you have IP protection?
TC: We have two patents pending. One is for our customer-centric data display that simplifies complex EMG data into real-time, actionable insights, instantly, without specialized engineering or data expertise. This offers real-time software insights and real-time optimization of the athlete’s or patient’s movements. The other is for proprietary thresholds and baselines based on five-plus years of unique training data.
BP: Any milestones you’d like to share with VT investors?
TC: We just announced the New York Yankees as a customer. They skipped our trial period and went straight to purchasing multiple packages. The Arizona Diamondbacks did our trial, then purchased multiple packages and now want a significantly higher number. Our “land and expand” strategy is hugely successful: 100% of the professional sports teams that have completed a trial have converted to paying customers. We’re on track to enter the clinical physiotherapy market with seven clinics in the pipeline, one of which has 2,000 locations. Market momentum is expanding rapidly. In the first month of 2025, we quadrupled our revenue actuals for all of 2024 and are on track to exceed Q1 2025 revenue targets.
BP: What investment round is this and what is your intended use of funds?
TC: This is our Seed Round and we’re raising $2 million. We have about $1.75 million committed. That leaves $250,000 for VisionTech investors.
Half of the raise will go to product commercialization. This includes investing in our elite sports sales and customer success, closing our first healthcare system deal. Our next bucket is product scalability by enhancing our AI and cybersecurity. We will also direct funds to quality management implementation, and sensor inventory.
BP: Give me three reasons VisionTech investors should invest?
TC: First, our technology is unique, proven with real impact on the bottom line for customers, and the traction we’re getting in major league sports—nearly 50% of MLB teams and 30% of MLS are using Oro Muscles—and interest from health systems is largely organic and significant. This is largely due to the expert team across multiple departments that we have put together. Second, we’ve had conversations with potential acquirers that were positive with a clear case for acquisition. Finally, our cap table is clean, our valuation is reasonable, we’re very capital efficient, and will soon be self-sustaining. This is a great opportunity to get in with Oro Muscles early in the game.
VisionTech’s Virtual Pitch Event on Wednesday, March 19 begins promptly at 12 noon ET. Plan to join me and Oro Muscles Co-founder and CEO Tanya Colonna and fellow VisionTech investors. Please register here.