Dreamoro Ventures believes in the transformative power of technology to shape the future. The venture capital firm identifies, funds and grows transformative digital healthtech, digital media and entertainment startups to solve social problems, profitably.
The Dreamoro team — all former technology founders themselves — works with founders to help bring to market products that have a positive impact on our community, people’s lives and the planet.
Dreamoro is now raising its first fund ‘Dreamoro Ventures Fund 1’, targeting an $80 million fund, focused on digital healthtech and its convergence with digital media and entertainment.
CEO, Founder and Managing Partner, Klaus Bartosch, recently joined me to explain the work Dreamoro does, its positive impact in the digital healthtech space and some of the tech innovations it supports.
An experienced mentor, entrepreneur, advisor and inspiring leader, Klaus understands the challenges that founders face, having experienced more than his share over his career.
Before founding Dreamoro almost two years ago, Klaus founded digital healthtech venture 1st Group Ltd — the company behind healthcare appointment booking, patient engagement and online marketplace platform, MyHealth1st.com.au — which he listed via an IPO on the ASX in 2015.
By the time of his exit in October 2022, the company had thousands of healthcare customers across Australia and New Zealand, taken over 18 million online appointments, and partnered with private hospitals, pharmaceuticals, buy-now-pay-later leaders and practice management software vendors.
Healthcare facing a hard brick wall
Commenting on the opportunities in digital healthtech, Klaus said, “Healthcare has a hard brick wall coming at it that’s less than a decade away.
“There isn’t a government on the planet that isn’t wrestling with the fact that healthcare budgets are going up by 20% every decade, eating into other government budgets. We’re all living longer with increased chronic diseases.
“In Australia, it’s a massive drain on the economy and on government budgets. The public hospital and private hospital systems are commercially and financially not coping, and private health insurers can’t secure enough younger members to offset the growing cost of older members. They’re just simply not generating the kind of revenue and margins they need to survive.
“And the healthcare industry operates on a reactive model. It responds only when symptoms have emerged and tries to fix you at greater cost and impact than preventing disease development and healthcare problems from emerging.
“We must move to a more patient-centred early intervention and preventative proactive model, rather than a reactionary model. The market opportunity to bring truly transformative digital healthtech to customers globally is huge and compelling, and savvy investors will reap the benefits as the impact of these technologies save and improve people’s lives.”
Evaluating digital healthtech opportunities
Yet in his experience, Klaus found that many investors really don’t understand what compelling digital healthtech opportunities look like.
He explained, “having raised a bunch of money from both private investors and through the public markets and having pitched to many family offices and VCs, the broader investor community a) doesn’t understand digital healthtech; b) doesn’t understand what those founders need to be successful; and c) do nothing to actually assist those founders at all.
“That’s generally true of early stage founders, doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. But it’s particularly true of digital healthtech where the complexities of that market are more significant than in something like fintech, which is a little less problematic and a little easier, frankly, than healthcare, which is a very complex market.
“I’ve seen VCs in Australia invest in digital healthtech ventures. And when I look at those ventures, I scratch my head and go, what are they doing? These ideas are never gonna work.
“They have to know how to engage that market, to engage the consumer. You’re dealing with a whole range of complexities and unless you understand them, knowing how to bring them to market is challenging.
“That’s where we bring some deep knowledge, experience and scars on our backs to help founders more successfully evolve and develop their strategies and bring them to market. We know we can have a big impact.”
Specifically, Dreamoro helps founders address the top 21 challenges that tech founders encounter. Most of these risks can be mitigated if founders have the courage to accept the reality of their situation and work with the right people and teams to bring their dreams to success.
It works with founders to help them define and develop Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to bring to market, and invests at Pre-SEED to Series-A, supporting those with passion and heart to execute and progress their tech-driven, industry-shaping businesses.
Klaus and his team structured the Dreamoro business to bring three core, core ingredients to the table to assist with its investments.
1. Dreamoro Ventures
The first is a founder-led VC fund, who bring deep experience not just in the digital healthtech market, but in online media and entertainment. This is relevant as the success of digital healthtech often utilises content and gamification to boost engagement.
Klaus explains, “We have deep competency in both those sectors. So we bring to founders a lot of market knowledge and capability around what it’s like to be a founder, and help them, support them, and engage with them.
“We spent the last two years engaging well over 400 digital health tech founders. As we’ve been building the fund and going out and raising capital, we also knew that we needed to make sure that we could demonstrate we had access to high quality deal flow.
“So we’ve been working hard to demonstrate that we’ve got access to the right quality of deal flow.”
2. Dreamoro Studio
The second piece to the model, in addition to Dreamoro Ventures, is its sister business, Dreamoro Studio — a technology and commercialisation team who help founders execute their ideas.
It wraps around those founders the additional technology and commercialisation capability to help them develop and bring to market their MVPs, which is done for a combination of cash, sweat equity and investment.
Klaus notes that the fund’s investment in portfolio companies is not conditional on founders using the studio as it is entirely optional by the founder. However, the studio helps derisk and improve the likelihood that a founder will execute their strategy successfully and not waste early-stage capital, which is common.
3. The Zivit process
The third piece to our model is what Klaus calls the Zivit process (named after Dr Zivit Inbar, an advisor he has been working with for over 10 years and is now part of the Dreamoro team).
He says that every investor will tell you that you’re backing people, so making sure who you pick is important. However, few have a due diligence process to assess the founder.
Dreamoro has a formal due diligence process led by Zivit. The typically eight hour formal process allows them to understand whether we’re dealing with a founder that is mentorable, coachable, smart, adaptable.
“Do they have the right values and ethics needed to operate in the healthcare market, and the resilience to survive? Frankly, we’re trying to avoid the challenges that I and other angel investors have found, of discovering downstream that the people leading it are not what they claim to be.
“We are proactively helping to nurture and support them to become great global leaders.”
Supporting innovative impact ventures
Some of the innovative ventures that Dreamoro is working with include a better way to detect and manage cardiovascular problems, the cause of 1/3rd of all deaths in the world; technology that can identify melanoma at the click of a camera; and a virtual reality platform to help people who have lost limbs prepare for their new prosthetic.
CardiAction: detecting cardiovascular disease on a mass scale
Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in men and the number two killer in women, yet more than 80% of it is entirely preventable.
Current methods used to detect cardiovascular disease are over 100 years old and horribly inaccurate, meaning doctors let many with heart disease walk out the door, or prescribe unnecessary statins to healthy patients. Current detection accuracy is no better than a flip of the coin.
Over the past ten years CardiAction has developed a mass population screening platform, which allows anyone to go online and fill in their blood pressure reading plus other readily available biometrics data to get an initial cardiovascular assessment.
The output is a risk indicator that will provide your level of risk of a cardiovascular event and of developing disease.
That platform is now being commercialised. It has been tested on over 4,000 people and has been deployed in New Zealand, including to a select Maori population, as indigenous people tend to be at a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
“The response to date by businesses, government agencies and universities that have been engaged with it has been remarkably positive as this is something that everyone wants solved. These guys have actually figured it out,” Klaus said.
He expects it to be deployed globally, used by government agencies and other health services companies around the world to start a mass screening process to drive people at risk into healthcare early — allowing for proactive action to be taken for the number one killer in the world.
Melanoma detection
Klaus’ work on the board of not-for-profit Melanoma Patients Australia, saw him introduced to a group of university students who had built technology to easily, accurately, and cheaply detect melanoma.
Using a camera that collects a particular spectral thermal image, coupled with an AI platform, the technology provides real time detection of melanomas.
Klaus explained that it has 99% accuracy, and can even test just a spec on the edge of a mole that might be melanoma.
The students initially developed the technology to determine the mineral composition of mined material, so that remote mining companies could get immediate answers without waiting weeks for lab assay results.
But the real opportunity for bringing about positive impact was its ability to identify melanoma.
“They’re going to be able to put into the hands of every GP on the planet — a camera that’s probably going to cost no more than $2,000-$3,000, that provides 99% accuracy, real time detection of melanoma.”
“When you realise the impact of skin cancers globally, it’s not hard to understand the impact that technology like this is gonna have. This product will pick up a lot of lesions that are being missed by doctors, and avoid the unnecessary ones resulting scars.”
The technology is now in clinical trials to further validate the accuracy of the model.
Virtual reality platform to prepare for prosthetics
Dreamoro is working with another startup that has built a virtual reality training platform to help people who have lost limbs prepare for their new prosthetic.
About four in ten people who receive a prosthetic limb abandon them within six months because they were unable to transition to using them effectively, and 60% suffer pain from the missing limb.
The platform lets you enter a virtual world, literally the day after surgery well before the prosthetic has been built (a typical 6 month delay), in which you can see yourself whole again. It allows patients to begin training on how to manoeuvre and do everyday things with a prosthetic.
After a traumatic experience, this can put them in a whole different headspace where hope becomes a reality and they can feel it from day one.
Use of the platform has reduced the prosthetic abandonment rate from 40% down to 10% — a profound impact for the one million people who lose limbs every year.
The two founders have been working on this high impact technology for four years. They now have TGA level one approval and are working closely with Dremoro to move toward rapid commercialisation.
Dreamoro Ventures Fund 1
The Dreamoro Ventures Fund 1 will invest in pre-seed, seed and start-up stages of development, with suited follow on investments in the expansion-capital stages of an investee It is targeting an $80 million fund.
The fund is structured as a ESVCLP (Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnerships), together with a stapled Trust, providing tax incentives and concessions and greater flexibility in what it can invest in beyond just early stage digital healthtech ventures.
“This is an opportunity to have the greatest possible impact that I can by bringing all of the knowledge and skill of my team to helping founders execute these profound innovations to take them globally — what a great legacy to be a part of,” Klaus said.
For more information on Dreamoro’s current raise and for a copy of the investor deck contact Klaus Bartosch at kbartosch@dreamoro.com.au.