The video presents a panel discussion with innovative entrepreneurs who are leveraging technology to enhance well-being and healthcare accessibility. Muna Muhammad, founder of Calzone, highlights the significance of athleisure and modest apparel designed for diverse body types, emphasizing the market gap for attire that suits individuals seeking both comfort and modesty. Muna used her background in biomechanics to create apparel that caters to underrepresented groups, reflecting personal inspiration from overcoming personal challenges while providing inclusive solutions in sportswear.

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. athleisure [ˈæθˌliːʒər] - (noun) - Casual, comfortable clothing designed to be suitable both for exercise and everyday wear. - Synonyms: (activewear, sportswear, leisurewear)

We've in this new category has entered the athleisure.

2. proliferate [prəˈlɪfəˌreɪt] - (verb) - To increase rapidly in numbers; multiply. - Synonyms: (multiply, burgeon, escalate)

It's not even that they're starting to proliferate, they have proliferated.

3. biomechanics [ˌbaɪoʊməˈkænɪks] - (noun) - The study of the mechanical laws relating to the movement or structure of living organisms. - Synonyms: (biomechanical engineering, kinesiology, human movement science)

decided to use my advanced biomechanics background to understand body types

4. ephemeral [ɪˈfɛmərəl] - (adjective) - Lasting for a very short time. - Synonyms: (transitory, fleeting, short-lived)

Smartwatch is constantly asking for your attention, it's another digital mouth for you to feed.

5. polyplasmography [ˌpɒliˌplæzməˈgræfi] - (noun) - A technology used to measure the volume of an artery or tissue for health monitoring. - Synonyms: (plethysmography, vascular imaging, hemodynamic monitoring)

That's the same technology, polyplasmography. It's the same thing they do.

6. deviations [ˌdiːvɪˈeɪʃənz] - (noun) - Departures from a standard or norm. - Synonyms: (divergences, variations, aberrations)

Those deviations could be you're getting sick.

7. demographics [ˌdɛməˈgræfɪks] - (noun) - Statistical data relating to the population and particular groups within it. - Synonyms: (population statistics, social statistics, census data)

It's shifted the demographics of our base and grown our business.

8. inclusive [ɪnˈkluːsɪv] - (adjective) - Including all the services or items normally expected or required. - Synonyms: (comprehensive, all-embracing, encompassing)

A lot more inclusive for young girls.

9. physiology [ˌfɪziˈɒlədʒi] - (noun) - The branch of biology that deals with the normal functions of living organisms and their parts. - Synonyms: (biological science, body function study, anatomy)

deviations in your physiology.

10. conception [kənˈsepʃn] - (noun) - The action of conceiving a child or one's ability to conceive. - Synonyms: (fertilization, insemination, fecundation)

And what the sort of base use case is of being comfortable while doing sports as opposed to something that's more inclusive or more directed, or whether it's understanding that not all women are the same and have had different journeys as it comes to contraception and conception

ŌURA, Kalsoni, Clue CEOs on the Next Era of Smart Health

I personally curated this panel because I really wanted to bring together a group of people representing businesses that are using technology to make fitness well being better, healthcare more accessible. We live in a world where there's a lot of toys and apps and clothing for the few. And what we wanted to do here is think about ways that you're using tech to make these things more accessible to the many.

Well, before we get into the conversation, we're going to throw a poll up to talk about the gadgets that you may or may not use to stay fit, track your steps, track other things in terms of your well being. So if you would not mind, we'll come back to the polling results in just a minute.

But I want to start with you Muna in the middle. I want to talk about the athletic peril that you focus on over the last decade or two. We've in this new category has entered the athleisure. There are so many brands out there that are aimed at helping people stay fit and new apparel that's pretty cool, pretty fashionable. What made in the midst of that, what made Calzoni your company necessary? Thank you for the introduction. I am from Minneapolis, Minnesota. My name is Muna. Muhammad, of course is up there.

I designed my business called Calzone, which means confidence in my language. I realized playing basketball, I was a semi pro basketball player and a youth basketball coach for over 11 years and realized a lot of apparel industries, specifically in the athleisure and the athletic wear, don't cater to those looking for a modest fit and realize that we needed to make a difference in this. And if you guys are wondering what the industry looks like, the modest fashion is about 365 billion and it's a really untapped market for those who really are looking for more loose fitted clothing.

And when I go shopping, I usually went shopping in the men's section to kind of find that fit. And I kind of got really tired and sick of going to the men's section shopping. So I was like we need more fashionable clothing for not only those who look like me, but anybody who may look for long sleeve clothing, who may have skin conditions, women who are more modest and decided to use my advanced biomechanics background to understand body types and understand different movements to create that for women and girls.

Great. And I'm looking forward to coming back to you in just a moment to talk about the technology that goes in to your clothing.

Rhiannon White, CEO of Clue Clue was founded more than a decade ago when there were fewer applications available for tracking menstrual cycles, there's many more have come to the market. We identified one or UK startups to watch. What are you doing to stay competitive in a world where apps are starting to proliferate? Yeah, it's not even that they're starting to proliferate, they have proliferated.

I think I was looking in the app store this week and There are over 225 apps doing very similar jobs to what we look to do. I think there's two things around that, to your point, around competition and differentiation. But also for me the bigger point is that actually the market, or you know, we like to talk about software, the tam, the total addressable market is so huge because when we're talking about women and girls and people with cycles, it's biologically determined. So everybody on this planet with this biology at some point needs to track and understand what's going on with them.

Then the market is really huge. And that's why there are so many people, I guess, looking to serve that need for us. In terms of why and how do we seek to differentiate? I think it's, I don't have a fancy answer. The real answer is that we're just really, really passionate about the people who we serve and we're really passionate about being very close to women and people with cycles needs and understanding their problems and understanding what they're trying to do and every, every day of every week caring about that really deeply and pouring that love into the product.

And I think we can see that in terms of the product and our user community because for us, if you just are constantly listening, then I think that pulls you ahead. You can probably hear from the funny accent. I'm from New Zealand and we don't do very well in swimming in the Olympics, but we did have this guy win a gold medal once and at the end of the race they said to him, what was your fancy strategy? Why did you win?

Normally New Zealand doesn't win. And he said, oh, I was just trying to keep up with the camera on the bottom of the pool. And I feel like if we can just keep up with users and the huge need that people have out there, then we will continue to make a really good product.

And how has your own personal experience informed the way, the passion that you bring to this work? This is very personal for me. I have three wild and wonderful children who are the center of my husband and Maya's life. But as for many people, I spent years thinking, oh, when it's time for us to Have a family, no problems. You know, I'll just look at my husband and we'll get pregnant.

And unfortunately, it didn't work that way. And actually it doesn't work that way for really a lot of people. And as we were going through our fertility struggles, it was, it's very isolating and you feel really alone. And, you know, for us, for me, this kind of vision that I had for us as a family and what we thought our future would be was at risk.

And, you know, there's a lot of people have that experience, you know, talk about things like crying in the toilets at work because once again you've got your period and once again you're not perio, you're not pregnant, and this is what you really want. And so we struggled for quite a while and we were living in the US at the time, and God bless America and their liberal approach to fertility treatments and drugs.

We were lucky enough to get pregnant with our first baby. But as we were going through that process, I kept the back of my brain, the product part of my brain was going, hang on a minute, this is all about data. And look at all this stuff that I didn't understand and that I should have known about myself. And so I became really focused on, I want to take control of this and I want to understand.

And we wanted to have more kids. And so I tracked and managed very closely in terms of. Because I was no spring chicken by the time we were able to finally have our son. And so, you know, we really focused in on that and we were lucky enough to have two more kids.

And so for me, this. I don't mind what people want. It's not to say that I think everyone should have babies. I just think that everyone should have the ability to have control over their health. And that's what I want us to do with our product. Thank you, Tom.

CEO of Aura, the smart ring maker. As you can see from the polling, there are a lot of people who use a lot of different, more than one device. We have lots of devices, lots of gadgets that we can use to track our fitness, our well being. Talk about, you know, why you believe.

The people at Aura believe that rings are a better alternative than a wristband than some of the other devices you can use. Yeah, it comes down to this location on the human body. This is the best place for a wearable because it's more accurate. You get a stronger signal coming to the pulse.

If you think about it, you have an artery that runs right underneath this sort of uniform Tissue right underneath the ring. Whereas on the wrist you're getting return flow, capillary action. There's hair, bone, sinew, all sorts of things that can bound the signal. Think about if you ever go to a hospital, where do they place the sensor? They put it right here at the tip of your finger. That's the same technology, polyplasmography. It's the same thing they do. They do that because it's more accurate.

So the premise is that a smart ring, unlike a smartwatch, which is constantly asking for your attention, it's another digital mouth for you to feed. You have to charge it frequently. You're constantly being asked to look at it to see what the latest Tom Giles post is on Twitter. You're really engaged with it, but at the same time it draws a lot of battery and so you're charging it.

I know where my smartwatch is. It's on the battery, you know, charger on the side of my bed when I go to bed. So a smart ring has a particular advantage. It's light, it's small, it doesn't ask for your attention.

It also has a very long battery life as a seven day battery life because it's very efficient in its use of the battery. It's more accurate. It also is something that you can just take with you wherever it fits into your life. It's something that looks just like a piece of jewelry.

It's a little bit novel than say a giant cellular phone on your wrist. But that's only part of it. The real important part of it is that if you're collecting data continuously and if you're looking at it at night, it turns out at night your body is in the same condition. You're in bed, you're at rest, you have a greater ability to detect deviations in your physiology.

And those deviations could be you're getting sick. Those deviations could be you're about to experience your cycle or be ready to conceive. Those deviations could be something more serious, like a long term health change. And so I think while many people think of a wearable as like a fitness tracker and you know, whether you do fitness or not, that's only one of the use cases and maybe not even the most important one or the most durable or the most valuable one, health turns out much more valuable because you want to know how you can live a long healthy life.

And something like aura, the software, the technology, the hardware, the AI, all those things are helping you to live a healthier life. Oura made a decision in the last few years to add some features that would make the Oura ring, which traditionally, historically was appealed toward a lot of men to make it more attractive to female users. Talk about the impact that's had on your business, on your user base.

So obviously the opportunity is huge. It has surprised us. Even in our greatest and wildest dreams. We did not expect the impact that we've had.

You know, we've grown the business triple digits. We're now 500 million as reported by Bloomberg. Thank you very much. We are, we are at a good scale of business, growing incredibly rapidly and profitable for the last 12 months.

That is all on the changes that we have made to appeal to women. Obviously a ring is appealing in some sense as a piece of jewelry, but the functionality that enables people who are trying to conceive, just as your story was like it is a really powerful story and highly motivating for a young couple trying to conceive. But on the other side of it, it's just being aware of your body for people going through menopause and perimenopause, understanding your physiology, being able to get some guidance and some compassion for that is really powerful. That has driven our business. Like honestly, I couldn't even describe to you.

It's shifted the demographics of our base and grown our business. You know, the female portion of our base has grown over 250%. Muna, your background is in kinesiology in addition to being a semi professional basketball player. Talk a little bit about how you use physiology, biomechanics in the design of your athletic wear.

Yes, definitely. When I was doing R and D and product design, I realized that a lot of the designs and activewear that are out there are not kind of fit that modest need that we wanted. So I kind of used my research background, working with the University of Minnesota to start looking at how our body moves, making sure that the products that we're creating has high level of comfort for those whether they're walking or playing basketball or any type of activity, ensuring that our products allow them to stay comfortable.

And it's really interesting when looking at product testing for if you don't know what I'm wearing on my head, it's called hijab, the head covering. And a lot of people haven't dipped into that part of product design. We have seen other companies create hijabs, but it's like not a one size fit fashion, especially for women. We like to create our own designs, have our own storytelling and realize that we really needed to focus on different Variety of sports, hijabs and headwear that's specific for different sports so that they stay secure.

So it was really fun getting some of our athletes out there trying different sports, wearing the hijab, seeing it come off, redesigning it. So really using advanced biomechanics to really figure out ways to keep the hijab and our products staying secure so folks can be athletic and fit. I started using the Oura ring during COVID when it was part of a research project with ucsf. They were looking at whether you could use wearable technology to predict the onset of COVID.

So I subjected myself to this study. I was the most boring subject of all because I got no Covid during Get drink. Exactly. But summarize a little bit about what has been learned from Aura in terms of predicting diseases.

Like so first of all, this was an extraordinary study. We had 70,000 people participate in it. 9,000 of them actually did get Covid and they had given us consent to look at their data so we could go back and see for the people who had a confirmed Covid case, we could actually see what the deviations in that baseline of their temperature, respiration, heart rate variability and heart rate was. And the signal was so clear 2¾ days before people had a confirmed PCR test or reported symptoms, we could see deviations in their temperature and respiration, heart rate and heart rate variability.

It's published in Nature. This has been a huge thing in Sensors magazine. People are understanding that if you have this kind of fine grained high signal data, you can make predictions that are incredibly powerful. Now of course, this led to the NBA adopting the ring during the bubble when they wanted to have people be able to understand like what they were potentially exposing themselves to.

This kind of capability I think is really novel. And it's a function of a continuous wear, wearable. It's not something that you're going to get with a device you take on and off because you won't see those deviations. The key here, now this is a thread across all three conversations, is that people are not the same.

Whether it's medicine is practiced on the averages or athleisure is sort of like targeting the largest market. And what the sort of base use case is of being comfortable while doing sports as opposed to something that's more inclusive or more directed, or whether it's understanding that not all women are the same and have had different journeys as it comes to contraception and conception. That is actually, I think the thread to pull through here, which is that in order to do personalization, what do you need?

You need data, you need machines to look across that data to make that personalization happen. And I think that's sort of maybe the twisting point that we're at is that we're starting to see kind of the benefits of that for healthcare, for wellness, for women's health, for sports. It's just, I think it pulls all the way through.

Rhiannon, you are also, your product is also used in research. Can you talk a little bit about that and are there anything, any new frontiers that you're embarking on these days? Yeah, and I mean, I completely agree with Tom's point around the criticality of the data and large scale data sets to enable the breakthrough in this. Often in women's health we talk about the research gap, but really it's a gaping crater.

And we've just completed and publishing at the moment a study led by researchers at John Hopkins University around looking at the connection between GI symptoms and mood and the menstrual cycle. There's been quite a lot of research that's shown improved a link between GI symptoms and mood and folks with severe depression. But this was a very large scale survey.

We looked at 33,000 cycles over four years and were able to draw a very strong positive association between the GI symptoms and the mood symptoms at all points in the cycle, but even more pronounced during the PMS phase. And for folks who suffered from pms, they have even more pronounced GI symptoms and more pronounced mood symptoms. So there's a really interesting validation there.

Using these large scale data sets, we can validate women's experiences and then hopefully push that through to better healthcare, better support in the healthcare systems. Because what often happens for folks is that they think something's not right, but because there's so little that's understood about the cycle, people go to the doctor and they're like, oh, it's just normal, just put up with it, it's just your cycle and people get brushed off. But, but you know, something's not right and these large data sets can actually help us push past that barrier.

There's something fascinating to me about the ways that we can use technology to overcome misconceptions. Muna, I want to come to you again and hear from you about ways that your work is helping overcome misconceptions about different groups. Women in sports, young women in sports, people from different from different backgrounds in sports.

How do you, what are you kind of encountering on a regular basis? Definitely when I was playing basketball, I realized like being the only young black Muslim girl playing sports is. You get a lot of funny stories playing basketball, hearing different things, but with everything, it's learning and developing and things like that and making the future a lot more inclusive for young girls.

And I think with all of us, it starts with someone thinking about our own personal experiences and realizing that there's a way that we need to do things different. One size doesn't fit all. Not all men are in tech. There are a lot of amazing young women who are entering the field.

So I see that it's like someone got to start it, so I had to do it. And seeing a lot of young, more young. I started with me playing only to coaching over 150 girls in Minnesota and working with a young girl who's an influencer and seeing thousands of girls playing basketball and some of them telling me basketball is not my sport and seeing them try other new things.

But the overall arching is that it's in our culture. When my parents used to live in Somalia, the idea of physical activity wasn't something that they did, is something that was in their daily life. It's not something that we go out of the way to go to the gym or play sports.

So it's creating a new environment of being more intentional on the work that we do and getting more women and girls moving in our culture. I want to stay with you for just one more quick lightning round for everybody. Where are you in your fundraising journey and are there particular things that you have that have been particularly challenging for you in raising funding for your business? Yes.

If you guys ever look at the statistics of black woman being funded, it's about less than 2%. And I realized that right now I'm not funding just yet. Hoping to start doing it in the next few years. But realize that it's a really interesting area and really tough area, especially pitching to folks who may not understand the need.

And I realized there's a lot of education that I'm having to do, trying to convince people to give me money. But it's a learning curve like everything. But it's definitely been a tough area. Well, I hope to come back to you another time and hear how things are going.

Rhiannon, I believe, if my memory serves, Clue raised funding from VCs in 2023, but the company's also experimented with letting users become investors. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like, how that went, what you learned from that, and where are you in your fundraising journey right now? Yeah, last year we did a crowd Raise as well. It was a fantastic experience, and we were almost overwhelmed.

We had over 5,000 people invest directly. How much altogether? I don't think we've disclosed that publicly. You could do that now. Yeah.

Really? Go on. It's just between friends, huh? Yeah. No one else would know, but it was really.

It was a really strong signal, I think, from the. And actually, this is really. When Tom was speaking, I got kind of emotional because it's amazing to hear your business has grown so much through serving women and women's needs and women's health. Right.

And we. That was a successful race for us. We're in a great position now. We're close to profitability, and that's what we do as well.

Right. And I just. I feel like it's kind of amazing to hear how large the opportunity is, and yet it's still so hard to get funded in our area. It's not at all easy.

I mean, you know what you were just saying. Tom, you talked about the 500 million in annual revenue. I think the last we chatted, you were at 2.5 million rings small. Any updates to that number?

Well, we're well over 3 million now. Okay. And so fundraising plans. When we've talked about an IPO in the past, you've talked about having no immediate plans, haven't hired bankers.

My question for you is, what is the message to employees and to your venture backers who might be eager for an exit for some liquidity event? I think we're very fortunate to be part of what could be described as a rule of 95 company, and at scale, growing that quickly and being profitable kind of makes us an n of 1.

So to answer your question directly, what we say to investors and to employees is your equity is incredibly valuable, and it is probably going to be more valuable six to 12 months from now. So if you would like to trade for liquidity, you know, you're probably making the wrong trade based on the future value. And by the way, I think people really understand that employees are so much more sophisticated today about, you know, private market equities and how liquidity affects that.

So we haven't had any concerns. And Stripe has certainly shown the path that you can remain a private company and then serve the needs of liquidity as you do it. I think we're lucky. We're fortunate to be in the position we are, and that's a big enabler of it.

Well, thank you. We're out of time. Tom, Luna and Rhiannon, thank you so much for joining. Please join me. Thank you.

Technology, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Wearable Technology, Well-Being, Women'S Health, Bloomberg Live