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I was born in Durban, South Africa, where I was surrounded by immense family love, the compelling challenges and lessons of apartheid, friends of all colors who helped me grow, and an environment so beautiful that I felt blessed to be alive. Despite that being my physical origin, from the early days of my childhood, I felt an absurd feeling in my heart that I was from New York, where I now reside.
I have always been very ambitious and deeply interested in winning. From being placed first in my class in every year of school, to graduating at the top of my class in medical school, and as the most awarded resident in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, I was eager to always give off my best. For me, winning is about personal achievement, and about dedicating myself to acquire and apply knowledge at the highest levels in the service of being a physician. That need has never left me. When I lose (and I do), that makes me even more determined to win. Passion runs through my veins almost every waking minute of the day. That’s no exaggeration.
Throughout my development, I could never abandon my love for music and the arts, my pure lust for integrative thinking, and the deep desire to advance my own thinking on healthy longevity so that others could benefit too. I was born to play too. As Albert Einstein once said, “Play is the highest form of research.”
It is no wonder then, that I joined Patrick Candela, Reulay’s CEO, when he asked me to lead the medical strategy for Reulay, a digital therapeutics company that merges medicine and art, computational intelligence, and integrative medicine, all on one platform. Patrick has the soul of a saint, and not every person is blessed enough to work closely with someone they can call a close friend and playmate. Despite us having very different backgrounds, we have the same brand of curiosity, faith, determination, passion, unstoppability, and intention. We believe that the world must come alive. And we’ve been building Reulay with that purpose in mind.
We are building a platform to address many of the gaps in the current medical system: lack of access to care, absurdly long wait times, insufficient professional and qualified resources, diagnostic confusion, unaffordable and generalized care, ineffective interventions, boring psychological approaches, fractured perceptions of health, and misperceptions of what medical research really means. Our digital platform deployable from the mobile phone to the metaverse solves for the problems of lack of access, wait time, and unaffordability. My expertise, together with our CTO, an MIT-trained computer scientist, has shaped Reulay We like to call this AI-powered, expert-driven, evidence-based well-being.
Now, Reulay is a company providing a first point-of-care and bridging care in a world where 70% of people cannot access mental health and more than 50% of people cannot afford it. We have developed and provide a digital therapeutic platform for evidence-based well-being. After gaining initial traction in market with sports teams, corporations, and first responders, and signing a multi-year six figure contract with a Fortune 500 organization, our achievements continue to make me and our entire team proud.
At Mayo Clinic, we have a peer reviewed publication that demonstrated statistically significant improvements in anxiety, emotional distress, and focus. In this world of burnout and fatigue, who wouldn’t want that? We have increased our library of video experiences ranging from 2.5 to 10-minutes by designing them based on brain-based or clinical criteria across three channels: nature-based journeys, geometric art, and fractal art. I have developed proprietary science-based art criteria so that we can scale our experiences intelligently using AI. We have a feed that provides growth mindset tips, breathing exercises, brain-based tips, inspirational ideas, and loving-kindness meditations. And our latest development is an AI based, expert-driven platform that provides a place to hold people waiting for care, or where their care has been disrupted. In so doing, we’re saving money lost due to waiting times and disrupted care, and because we can be delivered across mobile devices, desktop computers, televisions, or virtual reality headsets, people access Reulay in a variety of ways. Our 1-month adherence is more than 200% greater than comparable meditation apps. Qualcomm has selected Reulay for their Snapdragon SDK program, including a $25,000 USD equity-free grant to develop on their platform.
Marsh McLennan (#1 benefits brokers in the US) has just successfully sold Reulay to their first client reimbursed by Cigna. We’ve successfully renewed 100% of contracts with existing customers. We are effective in 76% of users. I was selected as a delegate and represented Reulay at the inaugural Global Mental Health Task Force on the future of mental health alongside at the UN. And CB Insights has recognized Reulay as a Top Mental Health Tech Company in two categories.
But we’re not done yet. Our greatest innovations in care are being designed. More channels will be added. Two more publications are under peer-review. And when we open our seed round in early February 2024, we will find the partners who care about mental and physical health as much as we do, so that we can finance this build up and provide what is sorely missing in the world today.
I love winning. And the best part is—if Reulay wins, the world wins too.
