HealthTech member
Kouo
Shaan Bassi, CEO, and Keidi Kapllani, CTO, chat to Eagle Labs HealthTech about their business Kouo.
Tell us about your business.
KOUO is changing the way people experience mental health by bringing accessible neural-imaging to the consumer market. Using combinations of sensors embedded in earphones the KOUO app monitors biological signals and neural activity. This allows us to measure and metricate emotional states and provide people with clear insights and a better way to track and manage their mental states. KOUO is to mental health what Fitbit is to physical health.
The app, powered by the earphones, offers responsive notifications to interrupt moments of distress, a content centre that adapts to the user's needs and a calendar view mapping progress over time, giving insights into states of mind.
The team is comprised of PhD researchers from Oxford, Vienna and Imperial College London and supported by engineers, venture builders and creatives.
When did you start your business?
October 2019.
What's been your biggest highlight?
Our alpha launch with users to get feedback on the design and experiences has been a great highlight, as has been securing over 1000 people on our preorder waitlist and £20k in attempted preorders. These elements of feedback, helping us understand how we can best help our users, have been the most rewarding.
What's been your biggest challenge?
Initially, connecting up our whole data pipeline has been tricky with moving parts across the neuroscience, sensors, app interface, software and class-action algorithms. The main takeaway from this stage was this; it is all too easy to slip out of starting simple. This learning process has been incredibly valuable. It enforced the fact that we have to keep it simple and get it right before we can start building more.