Each week, I’ll delve into the details of the eight startups participating in the fourth iteration of Philly Startup Leaders Accelerator. The 12-week program — which is unique in that it takes no equity in the companies — pairs startups with mentors, brings in speakers to dig into the basics of building a successful business, sets benchmarks and prepares founders for a Demo Day at the end of the program when they show off their progress.
RoundTrip
Who are they: RoundTrip’s founding team includes Founder and CEO Mark Switaj, Chief Information and Product Officer Ankit Mathur and Corporate Administrator Angela Damiano. Each brings an expertise to the team, as Switaj has more than 15 years of experience in patient transportation, Mathur has more than 14 years of experience in IT and software development and Damiano has a strong background in financial analytics.
What they do: RoundTrip is, by the most simple definition, Uber for non-emergency patient transport. But its potential effect on patients’ well-being and health providers’ efficiency is more complicated. The product came about from Switaj’s deep knowledge in medical transport and its inefficiencies.
“Really it’s [Switaj’s] experience that is one of our biggest competitive advantages in this industry. He’s seen this industry from all sides,” said Damiano. RoundTrip works with both medical transportation companies and health care providers to improve the process of requesting a transport, including providing data analytics, saving patient profiles, predicting potential traffic issues, furnishing arrival times, booking future trips and more.
The startup raised $400,000 in a friends-and-family round in the middle of last year, as well as $100,000 of the founders’ own funds, to get their software from the concept stage to a working prototype. From there, they’ve landed contracts with Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children and Cooper University Hospital. RoundTrip completed 100 trips in February and is already exploring an expansion to New England and Virginia. The team has even been approached by an organization on the West Coast.