Clynx Raises €150K Pre-seed Investment Round

Motivation is a crucial aspect of physical therapy and rehabilitation. Clynx boldly introduces gamification as the novel approach to help therapists create challenging settings that stimulate patients to stay engaged and keep practicing. Having raised their €150K pre-seed round, Clynx are looking to fuel their expansion plans and fund new projects by building a strong team that will virtually shape the digitization of health in the upcoming years.  

Q: Tell us about Clynx (elevator pitch) 

Clynx is a Digital Health startup based in Lisbon, whose aim is to make Physiotherapy an enjoyable experience.

With our first product, Motiphy+, we enable a digital, gamified approach for physiotherapy sessions, which can be used both in clinics and for home-based treatments. It provides more motivation and convenience for patients while improving the flexibility and capacity of Healthcare entities.

Q: How has been your experience in Demium so far?

We joined Demium Lisbon in June 2021 for their Programme. We had founded Clynx before but this programme and Demium’s team and mentors were key for us to deepen our go-to-market strategy and prepare for the Pre-Seed round. It has been great to grow within Demium’s rich entrepreneurship ecosystem and to meet people with different skills and experience.

Q: What was it like raising a round for the first time?  

It was a challenging but exciting phase. It was the moment to reconsider our journey and set all relevant topics in perspective - business opportunity, product, market potential, financials, and scaling. We enjoyed this process of planning a growth roadmap and ensuring we were able to communicate our vision to the investment committee.

Q: What will you focus your initial funding on? 

Our current major endeavor is to increase and establish our client portfolio in Portugal. With that in mind, we will use this funding to enlarge our team mainly in sales and marketing for client acquisition and product development, to keep on improving and updating the product we built based on our clients’ needs and users’ feedback. Client acquisition efforts will also entail that part of the budget will go to marketing campaigns, and clinical congresses attendance.

Q: What’s next for Clynx? 

We are continuously working on our mission to digitalize Physiotherapy and make it more enjoyable and flexible for patients and clinics. Now that our product has been used in more than 2000 physiotherapy sessions, shoulder, knee, hip and general mobility treatments, we plan to extend it to further physiotherapy types.

At the moment we are mostly committed to expanding our presence in the Portuguese market. We will begin our internationalization in early 2022 and prepare our seed round for the second quarter of 2022.

Q: What did you find investors valued most about your startup?  

We have a bootstrapping journey and three years of experience in the market, which are the two factors that prove how resilient we are, in the sense that we were aware of the entrepreneurship challenges, able to find alternative financing sources, and also deeply engaged in making Clynx successful. Furthermore, the fact that we (Joana and Gonçalo) have very complementary skills allows us to have greater control over the most important range of responsibilities of our company, from strategy and business to technology and product innovation. Last but foremost, we are the right team to help Clynx take off.

Q: What advice would you offer other entrepreneurs looking for first round funding?  

The first and most basic one is to make sure you have a deep understanding of your company - not just your product or the problem you are addressing - really dive into how your target market works, collect insights from your stakeholders, define your business model and understand key growth variables. As a practical tip, after considering all those important big fields it is useful to put together a simple FAQ document with sub-topics. Finally, mark a reasonable yet ambitious roadmap to grow your startup.

Q: What role did Demium play in this first investment round?

For us, it was really important to join Demium for our Pre-Seed round preparation. With the help of their program, supported by Demium's team and mentors, we were able to leverage our early traction and optimize our business and growth strategy. This was key to making our business plan more robust and thus accomplish a successful first investment round with their partner fund.