Twelve months on from speedy grocery company Gorillas’ rescue deal in December 2022, founder Kağan Sümer is back to the fundraising grind with a new healthtech startup.
Mirror — a yet-to-be officially launched health management app Sümer set up earlier this year with Gorillas cofounder Uğur Samut — has raised between $6-8m, according to Sifted sources.
The round was led by Atlantic Labs' sister fund FoodLabs (which also invested in Gorillas) and Giant Ventures, with participation from Calm/Storm Ventures and a number of angels. Mirror confirmed with Sifted that it had raised a pre-seed round — but declined to comment on its size.
What Mirror does
Mirror is building a health management app, which will help people manage things like sleep, fitness and nutrition through a combination of physical tests, data from wearables and personalised recommendations.
The startup began beta testing with 200 people in Germany last month and plans to roll out the app to a wider group in the next two months. It will launch in its home market in the first half of 2024, before expanding to the UK later that year, Sifted understands.
Over the summer, it was reported that the company was building a blood-testing startup — but it’s since changed its plans, a source within the company tells Sifted. Blood tests won’t be available when the app launches in Germany in the first half of 2023.
Had Mirror pushed ahead with its original plans, it would likely have faced stiff competition from blood-testing startup Aware — which was founded by early-Gorillas backers and counts Atlantic Labs as an investor. It raised a $15m round in 2022 and launched last month.
Second-gen founders in healthtech
Operating in the shadows is becoming something of a rite of passage for the small but growing cohort of second-generation founders who’ve made the jump to healthtech.
Spotify’s Daniel Ek’s Neko Health, which operates body-scanning clinics, spent several years in stealth before officially launching at the start of 2023 — three months after Sifted revealed its existence. It announced a €60m Series A round in July this year.
Christoph Muhr, Groupon founder and former COO at car trading platform AUTO1, founded digi-physical health platform Patient21 in 2019 before eventually emerging from stealth in 2022 — with $142m of investor cash in the bank. It raised a further $100m in debt and equity in May this year.
Neko and Patient21’s rounds were two of the biggest in a year that’s seen funding for digital health startups fall off a cliff — the sector has picked up just $852m so far this year versus $2.5bn across the whole of 2022, according to Dealroom.
Amid the slump, investors don’t seem to have lost their appetite for second-generation founders in the digital health space. As Mirror pushes ahead with its 2024 launch, it’s an appetite Sümer and Samut will be hoping to whet, too.
