Newton
Eric Dolan's mother has epilepsy, and managing her seizures and medications was hard for the whole family. At her appointments, her doctor spent most of the visit playing detective, trying to reconstruct what had happened since the last visit. That frustration led Eric to build a simple tracking tool.
The team built a tracker using accelerometers, the same sensors found in smartwatches and smartphones, and paired them with their own filtering algorithms and artificial intelligence. The app can flag likely seizures in real time, ask the user to confirm, and record the event. Unlike competitors that sell custom hardware, Newton works on the iPhone, Android, and Apple Watch, with Android Wear planned. The team described its initial business model as lead generation: partners reduce the cost of prescriptions, and Newton earns a fee per prescription. It also plans to sell pharma companies market intelligence drawn from the data it collects.
Newton grew largely through word of mouth. Patients shared it in community groups, and doctors began recommending it across the country. Eric described an engineer with epilepsy who received a pamphlet with the Newton name at a Toronto clinic, a sign that the material was spreading without the company directly pushing it. The company said it reached more than 10,000 lifetime registered users, which it called high for a medical app.
The company worked on a real, painful problem and got early traction through trusted referrals. Its revenue model is unusual: patients use the app for free while Newton earns from pharmacy partners and pharma contracts. Eric said the company would not disclose current revenue. He said it was aiming for about $1 million in total revenue for the year, which was a target rather than a reported result.
As of the interview, Newton had a team of five, with plans to grow to about seven. It had raised about $1 million in seed funding on a convertible note through 500 Startups and partners including Dream It Health, Independence Blue Cross, and UPenn Medicine. Eric said the long-term goal is to expand from epilepsy to other chronic conditions and to become a market intelligence company.
- •Starting from a founder's own family problem gave Newton a detailed understanding of patient and doctor pain points that generic competitors lacked.
- •Device-agnostic software that runs on phones and watches people already own removes the hardware cost barrier that slows adoption of rival products.
- •Word-of-mouth spread through patient communities and doctor referrals suits a condition where trust and peer recommendations drive treatment decisions.
- •Chronic conditions create ongoing prescription needs, so monetizing per prescription and through data partnerships can produce more recurring revenue than one-time sales.
- •Collecting seizure and adherence data gives Newton a second revenue stream in pharma market intelligence, which compounds as the dataset grows.
- 1.Start with a problem you or someone close to you experiences daily, and interview the people who manage it, including patients, caregivers, and clinicians.
- 2.Build on sensors and devices users already own, such as smartphones and smartwatches, rather than requiring a proprietary hardware purchase.
- 3.Get trusted professionals to recommend the product by giving clinics materials they can hand to patients, and by making sharing easy in patient communities.
- 4.Identify a monetization partner whose incentives align with user outcomes, such as pharmacies that save patients money on prescriptions, and negotiate per-transaction fees.
- 5.Track and structure the data you collect from day one so you can later sell aggregated insights to industry partners.
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