Sanovation Closes Financing Round and Continues its Battle Against Chronic Pain

ZURICH, December 3, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

After having won the start-up battle at the Swiss start-up fair in September, the Zurich-based start-up Sanovation AG has more good news: Last month the team behind the pain diary app CatchMyPain was able to close a financing round by raising CHF 350'000 from business angels and friends.

CEO says: "I want to find patients like me"

The newly gained funds will allow Sanovation to reach its next goal: The release of the first community features inside the pain diary CatchMyPain. Starting in spring 2014, patients will be able to find and interact with other patients having the same pain pattern. This idea is driven by the personal pain odyssey of Sanovation's CEO Daniel Lawniczak:  He has been suffering from chronic pain for more than five years. During his odyssey he was convinced that there must be patients on this planet having the exactly same pain problem like he has and that some of those patients must have already found a satisfying solution which he could apply to his own problem.

However, finding those similar patients is difficult. Up to now, the only way to find similar patients is a web search e.g. using the words "back pain" which will usually lead to millions of meaningless search results. One big reason for not finding what you are looking for is the fact that there are hundreds of different pain patterns which could be described with the words "back pain". The advantage of the CatchMyPain app is the ability to draw the exact location of your pain problem onto a model of a human body. Machine learning algorithms are identifying clusters of similar patients, based on the pain drawings and the additional information from the anonymized pain diaries.

Finding the right diagnosis and best pain treatment

Medical experts agree that being able to compare similar patients on a global scale will bring new insights about chronic pain and patients will benefit from the interaction with peers who suffer from the same problem. The need to improve diagnosis and treatment is huge: Chronic pain is a widespread disease affecting around 20% of adults worldwide and half of the patients have been suffering for at least seven years. Another surprising fact is the age of chronic pain patients: 80% of patients are between 18 and 60 years old which means most of them won't have any problems using the modern pain tracker app CatchMyPain.

12'000 patients is just the beginning

So far, CatchMyPain was able to attract over 12'000 registered users. The team is confident to reach its goal of having 20'000 registered users until the end of 2013. Sanovation currently employs six full-time employees and the goals for next year are very ambitious: CatchMyPain shall attract over 300'000 users and the start-up shall reach break-even.

Due to the team size and the ambitious goals, the next financing round is already in preparation and it was kicked off two weeks ago with pitches at the Investors' Day in Berlin and at the Investors' Summit in Liechtenstein.