In 2023, Tayla Cannon moved from Australia to the U.S. for a job in a city she’d never seen before.
“No family, no friends, just a fresh start,” she told TechCrunch. A sufferer of chronic back pain, she first started working in physiotherapy, thinking it was helping make a difference in the lives of others. Yet the traditional physiotherapy model never quite lit a spark in her.
She moved to interventional cardiology but only became more disillusioned with the physical rehab model with “its localized, reactive, and volume-based nature,” she said.
Meanwhile, in her spare time, she became a content creator, sharing her perspective online about “proactive” and “holistic” ways people can get rid of pain.
That took on a life of its own.
She now has more than 130,000 followers on Instagram, a company called Athletic Rebuild, which provides rehab and performance coaching for athletes, and now, a platform called Rebuildr, a HIPAA-compliant and mentorship app to help rehab professionals run their own businesses online, set to launch early next year.
“I wasn’t trying to build a business; I was just putting my brain on the internet and helping people rethink what care could look like.”
Cannon and her works caught the eye of Slow Ventures, which announced on Tuesday that it invested $1.1 million as a seed round. She is one of the first creators to receive a check from Slow Ventures’ $60 million Creator Fund, which seeks to back content creators and influencers making an impact online.
Cannon said she had no plan when she started sharing her thoughts on social media in 2024 and then decided to make this her profession. “There was no strategy, no roadmap, and certainty no business model behind it,” she said. She credits what most content creators do for her success — remaining authentic and sharing unfiltered but genuine thoughts.
Expanding a brand on social media is not without challenges, however. Her social media presence, and therefore brand, was growing fast, which was good but also a problem. She was instantly faced with the need to understand business logic, consumer acumen, and content strategy to connect with new audiences. “None of which are taught in healthcare,” she continued. “We’re trained to help people, not to build brands.”
The turning point came when she actually realized she was the bottleneck to her own business. “I couldn’t keep scaling something that depended solely on me. I had to build something that could grow without me,” she said, adding that she ended up hiring people to help her with her projects.
She also grew her strategy when she moved from just talking about what’s broken in the world of rehab and started working on solutions to help fix it. Rebuildr is intended to be a “complete shift from localized reactive care to a proactive, holistic mode,” Cannon said, “combining consumer solutions, clinicians, education, and the software to deliver it all at scale.”
She was introduced to the team at Slow Ventures through a friend who invited her to one of the firm’s events in Austin. “I had zero intention of raising capital,” she said. “I wasn’t even pitching. I wasn’t even preparing a deck.” Still, she connected with Megan Lightcap, an investor at Slow, and told her about what she was building with Rebuildr.
“The conversation sparked something,” Cannon said, adding that Slow has helped her “imagine a version of Rebuilder that’s even bigger” than what she envisioned.
Other personal trainer software out there includes TrainHeroic, Trainerize, and Everfit. Rudder hopes that her product, Rebuildr, fundamentally reshapes the rehab industry.
“I want to make high-quality rehab accessible anywhere in the world, not limited by geography, insurance, or 30-minute appointments,” she said.