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UpLyft | Craig Misrach, President & CEO

UpLyft is a self-transfer system for patients with limited mobility. The system is easy-to-operate and capable of moving a person from a bed to a wheelchair in 1 minute.
Speakers
Craig Misrach
Craig Misrach
President & CEO, UpLyft

(Transcription)

Craig Misrach  0:04  

Hi everyone, I'm happy to be telling you the story today of Uplyft, Brad, gave a great introduction. We are the first independent self transfer system for people with limited mobility to use in their home. We are also aiming to become the gold standard in patient transfer, Gurney bedside in hospitals, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities. So we have a revolutionary product that otherwise does not exist in the world. It's a massive market in the United States of almost $20 billion. Looking at the home care home health sector, as well as the institutional health care facilities. We have preorder sales, it's very rare for medical device company direct to consumer to have pre orders, we have over $200,000 of pre orders and institutional sales channel that we're harvesting. This year, we have a patent to state other aspects of competitive advantage with our FDA exemption, manufacturing is well underway. And a team that has generated over a billion dollars of enterprise value in medical device ventures, mostly here in Southern California. And so again, the problems that we're tackling with Uplift is that people do not have the ability to transfer themselves from bed to wheelchair or vice versa, in their home, if they can't get out of bed by themselves. There's actually 3 million people in the United States that the US Census Bureau says cannot get out of bed on their own. And so such folks have a reduced quality of life. They lack some independence and an institutional health care facilities. We are now talking about a $20 billion dollar annual worker's compensation claim issue, actually back and neck injuries from patient lifting the $20 billion. It's the leading cause of workers compensation claims in the US healthcare system today. Why is it you ask? Look at the current transfer methods. They're so archaic, they require a caregiver, there's immense physical labor required and a high risk of injury. And even in the most advanced transfer systems, patient weight limits are only 275 pounds. So I'm going to show you a demonstration. I think we need to cue the video here. See if it works as a product demo of Uplift. Here we go. So this is our founder, Anton Simpson. He's 84 years old. He's a triple degree engineer from MIT and a 35 year aerospace engineer. He invented Uplift because his dear friend Patrick got in a car accident was paralyzed from waist down. And his wife said to Anten she could not lift them out of bed. He weighed 275 pounds. What does a guy like Anson do he goes into his garage, he builds a first prototype and his friend Patrick used it for two consecutive years to independently transfer out of bed and into his wheelchair. And so his Antenas transferring over. I want to highlight that we have 15 issued patents three in the United States 12 internationally, and his Antin is lowering himself down into the wheelchair, his hands on the outside, those are simply Up Down, Left Right buttons. A family member, a nurse, a caregiver can easily use up lift for zero lifting, Assisted Transfer. As I mentioned, we have 15 patents. We have six additional that are filed under prosecution, I'm happy in the breakout room to get into various aspects of the intellectual property. But from a competitive landscape standpoint, it's pretty simple. We're the only self transfer system, we've reduced injury, it's a comfortable ride, it takes less than two minutes. And we're comparing from a consumer standpoint, the cost of Uplift, versus the full time annual cost of a caregiver that needs to be there to get a person in and out of bed. It's an easy purchase decision in order to restore some aspects of independence. And so it's a massive market $20 billion in the United States, just focused on homecare hospitals and skilled nursing facilities. It's over it's almost $10 billion, if we just focus on our direct to consumer channel. And the the the global markets estimated to be four times that of the US. It's so refreshing to have a direct to consumer medical device story where you can actually get to the consumers with quick reach. We have a full proprietary digital marketing, e commerce and social media platform that we've developed to generate all of our pre orders. So low barrier to us thanks to an FDA exemption, the FDA issued specific guidance for electric lifts not needing to file for class two device clearance as long as we adhere to quality control standards and Good Manufacturing Practice which we are. This is intentionally font that you can't see. Because I want you to see some examples of the pre orders that we have during COVID When we were not allowed to walk into an institutional health care facility. We fired up and turned on our digital marketing and E commerce platform, we're talking Google ads, Facebook ads, and Instagram ads. And you can see folks on this list that have spinal cord injuries, ALS, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis seniors, folks with obesity challenges, they're willing to pay $9,000 cash. We haven't shipped a device yet. But we have 200 grand of pre orders. We're extremely excited about the pent up demand. Because again, many of these folks are in a health crisis, and one something like Uplift to help them. So we're going to continue to leverage our digital marketing and ecommerce platform, we have a 13 times return on adspend for generating orders through social media and digital marketing. The medical device industry average is three times and so we're 400% more efficient. It costs us less than $500 to acquire a customer. And we plan to leverage this going forward with direct response television advertising, really no different than the stairlift industry. So everyone in this room has probably seen commercials on stair lifts. Many are surprised to know that the two leading stairlift companies are over a billion dollar market cap $400 million revenue generating companies, by definition are demographics at home, they have television on. And so we're going to do the same thing with DRT. The advertising, there actually is a reimbursement code of about over $10,000 We're selectively evaluating how to file for that with Palmetto versus it may be more beneficial to actually get our own code at a 25 to $30,000 reimbursement point. But again, direct to consumer folks are paying cash already for us. And so our model direct to consumer is cash pay. We also have very attractive leasing and short term rental strategies which will create sticky recurring revenue for the business. And in healthcare facilities. It's a higher price point, we do have initial orders. So it's a higher price point because there's additional features much more training required with the staff. And we're looking forward to putting our foot down to that with health care facilities in 2022. In these facilities, it's about health and safety for the health care worker I mentioned the 20 billion and workers compensation claim costs due to back and neck injuries from patient lifting. Our nurses are heroes. They've been through a lot. There's a shortage of nurses. We want them to be able to work healthy, and the facilities as well don't want the burgeoning workers compensation claims. And so our go to market strategy for institutions, we've hired a head of sales who has three decades of institutional medical equipment sales experience, he's also a registered nurse. We're going to expand that Salesforce and selectively evaluate distribution partners going forward as we scale the business. We've had 10 prototypes over 120 usability studies or most recent usability study was completed prior to commencing manufacturing, where the biggest learning from that was the need to incorporate a headrest, which we are now doing in manufacturing or contract manufacturers pathway in PEI and CU California where we're based medical device only contract manufacturer, I'm proud to say we do not have supply chain issue challenges. We do not have software, we are not falling prey to chip shortages. These are motors actuators levers pulleys, cost of goods is under to $2,000. And we plan to use multiple contract manufacturers as we scale the business going forward. So a lot that we've achieved for a company with under 2 million in equity financing to date. We have a several 100 grand in the pre order sales that we are fulfilling next month. It's an exciting time for the company. I mentioned our patent estate, we've started manufacturing, and this is our team. This is my second medical device company. I've been CEO my first company I founded out of my MBA program raise 15 million generated 45 million of enterprise value. We sold that business to sign a care in China in 2017. Rajiv Malhotra, a 20 year McKinsey partner, avid healthcare investor, he is putting a quarter million in closing over the next 30 days, a million dollar cash infusion. Angel investors are welcome in that round, and longer term we'd look to bring in up to 10 million to help scale the business mostly in marketing, sales and customer service. With that, thank you very much for your time and helping us achieve our mission of restoring independence for those who suffer from mobility challenges and best protecting caregivers from encountering patient lifting injuries, talked in the breakout room. Thank you

 

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