#166 Awear: Whoop For Your Brain

Antonio: My name is Antonio Forenza and I'm originally from Italy and I'm based in San Francisco. I am an entrepreneur, an inventor, an engineer. And most of all, I'm very passionate about mental well-being

I’m Josh Muccio and this is The Pitch. Where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. Today on the show, Antonio Forenza is pitching a wearable that makes tracking your mental health as easy as tracking a workout. The prototype keeps telling him he’s pretty stressed… probably because he’s starting a hardware company

Antonio: Financially what I'm doing does not make any sense, but not having an income for two years is like, whoa, what are you doing, Antonio? But, this is the best job I've ever had in my life. Every time I wake up in the morning with a smile.

The Pitch for Awear is coming up, after this. Thank you so much for subscribing to the show. Don’t forget to turn on notifications. And for those of you who have said, hey, you guys should start a newsletter - we have! Subscribe at pitch.show/newsletter.

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Welcome back to The Pitch for Awear. Let’s meet the investors

Elizabeth Yin with Hustle Fund

 you're an A plus founder.

Charles Hudson with Precursor Ventures

I feel like I’m the lone dissenter

Ben Zises with SuperAngel

I’m not seeing anything else super revolutionary here

And Kate McAndrew with Baukunst

For those who can’t see, my jaw is currently on the floor

[clap] 

Ben: Hello?

Antonio: Hey, good to meet you

Charles: Hey, Charles, how are you Antonio? Nice to meet you. 

Antonio: Nice to meet you

Elizabeth: Oop Sorry. Elizabeth. Nice. Nice to meet you. 

Antonio: Antonio. Nice to meet you. 

Kate: Hey, I'm Kate. 

Antonio: Antonio. 

Kate: Nice to meet you.

Ben: Ben. 

Antonio: Nice to meet you Ben. 

Ben: Welcome. 

Antonio: Thank you. I am Antonio Forenza, founder and CEO of Awear. We're building Oura for your mental wellness. So a few years back I had really hard times managing my stress. I was anxious, irritable, and overweight. So I decided to do something about it. I got myself an Apple watch and start monitoring my exercise and calorie burn. And I lost 40 pounds in 12 months. Now my mental wellness journey was a little bit more bumpy than that. Actually, a lot more bumpier. That's where I got the idea of Awear. So we have so many tools today to monitor our physiological wellness, but there's nothing to measure our mental wellness. And so Awear is the smart ear cuff that uses EEG technology and machine learning to help you track your emotions. The mobile app has a conversational AI coach. Awear empowers you to take control of your own mental wellbeing. Now, like me, three out of four people in the US experience sustained stress to the point that is affecting their physiological and mental health. Mental wellness alone is a $500 billion market. I have 20 years of experience building hardware and software with over 300 patents issued worldwide. I have strong experience leading technical team and R&D teams. We have a working prototype of the hardware and the mobile app backed by neuroscience validations. Coming out of Techstars, we are now raising our preseed round of 700k to go to production. 

Elizabeth: So how does this work exactly? 

Antonio: Yeah, so it's a nice fashionable ear cuff that measures your brainwaves. And then we use machine learning to map your brainwaves into emotions. 

Elizabeth: How does that help you, I guess, become less stressed? 

Antonio: Yeah -

Elizabeth: Like it tells you you're too stressed, like calm down or -

Antonio: Yeah, so there are, there are two ways. There is the real time component of it, where you bring self-awareness in the moment as you're getting stressed. It tells you, slow down, breathe for five seconds. You can have a much more productive meeting. Or you can also do the long-term track where you start seeing that you have a week worth of stress and maybe you need to slow down, maybe you need to take a break. In fact, it tracks your mental wellness and gives you tips 

Elizabeth: And it's talking to you or you look at an app? 

Antonio: So the first, the first version is gonna be through the app. That's what we're building right now. But in the future, we might actually include new features in the hardware. The first version’s gonna be very simple, just like the first Oura ring. It was very bulky. 

Josh: Antonio, can you show them? 

Antonio: Oh, yeah, absolutely

Kate: Oh yeah. I would - are those, looks like, prototypes?

Antonio: Yes. So these are cosmetic prototypes and this is a prototype that we're doing for medical devices. It's a different form factor, but the electronics is the same. 

Charles: It's essentially, looks like a, if you imagine a C shape clamp. Looks like it would close pretty neatly along an ear. Pretty light. Doesn't feel too heavy

Kate: Mm-hmm. Sort of a 3D printed oblong, almost like a stone kind of, that I assume would house the electronics. And that goes, tucks on the back of your ear.

Antonio: Exactly. 

Kate: So it looks like a piece of jewelry and then the tech is gonna tuck behind the back of the ear. My guess is that you could use a lot of different metal treatments or jewelry like treatments to customize the aesthetic. But I'm designing your product for you live on this podcast, so maybe you should answer that. 

Antonio: Yeah. So, uh, I believe, we believe it's gonna be the same thing as Oura. You know, eight years ago I said, I will never wear a ring and look at me right now. So you have different style. You have gold, silver, brown, and black. And we believe that he's gonna be a fashion statement, but also a way to tell people, I care about my mental wellness. So this is a way to remove also the stigma that is associated to mental wellness, and that's why we, we believe it's gonna be really powerful.

Kate: So I interestingly have looked at a couple of ear wearables and I believe that, I actually believe that. Something visible that signals something about yourself as an edge of culture person and then that edge of culture identification moving more mainstream. I believe that that's possible. A couple of things that I would really love to understand. The Apple Watch is the tech, the sensors, everything that it can do. It keeps getting better and better. And so I'm really curious. Why is your quote unquote stress proxy or mental health signal, why is that superior to what Apple can already do or will be able to do in a couple of years with something that's wrist worn? Because my fear would be, oh, well Apple ships something that's like. We're gonna tell you your stress measure based on, you know, this triangulation or whatever, and like, you're screwed, right? 

Antonio: Absolutely. So it's very complimentary to any wearable that already exists. The core technology is EEG 

Kate: EEG

Antonio: Electroencephalography. 

Kate: Yep. 

Antonio: So we are measuring the, the electrical signal generated by your neurons that reach the surface of the scalp. You have these two biomarkers that are arousal and valence. These are terms used in neuroscience. By mapping these two dimensions, you can derive all the different emotions. Professor Lisa Pell from UCSF, department of Psychiatry, she talks a lot about 

Kate: mm-hmm. 

Antonio: How the way to prevent depression is to recognize the recurring state of high arousal, low valence, which is associated with tension, stress. And gradually, with self-awareness, with CBT, with DBT, bring yourself down to a state of calm. And so that's what we do with Awear. The foundations of Awear are common CBT. 

Kate: Mm-hmm. 

Antonio: We’re just applying a combination of neuroscience principle and psychiatry principle to the wearable

Kate: And I'm assuming that it is not possible to get EEG on the wrist. You have to get it exactly on the ear.

Antonio: Exactly. Yeah.

Kate: Okay. 

Antonio: And our, our goal in this is our great differentiation compared to other neurotech startup is the form factor. So you'll see a lot of neurotech that have headbands -

Elizabeth: Headbands

Antonio: - helmets. Coming out Techstars, what we learn interviewing customers is that they want something fashionable and they can wear every day. And since our use case was continuous monitoring, just like the Oura Ring, that's how we came up with this, uh, form factor. 

Ben: So your background is, you are responsible for 300 hardware patents? 

Antonio: Yeah. Software and hardware. 

Elizabeth: Were you working at a company before? What kinds of devices? 

Antonio: Yeah, so I spent the last 20 years on my life in telecom actually, building mobile infrastructure, both in startups and large corporations. Right before I founded Awear I was Senior Vice president of R&D for Rakuten, a Japanese company. 

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm. 

Antonio: So I've had a lot of experience leading technical and R&D teams. 

Elizabeth: Uh, have you built any hardware devices at any of these companies before?

Antonio: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I built a lot of 4G and 5G based stations.

Elizabeth: Okay. 

Antonio: The first prototype I developed myself. The signal processing was the same that I did for the last 20 years. Only it was much easier. Now I can run on a phone instead of running on servers. 

Charles: Can you talk more about just like the cost profile of making the, the cuff? 

Antonio: Yeah. So we are looking at $300, uh, the price of the cuff. Uh. With about 77% profit margin at scale. 

Kate: Okay. What are your, those cogs sound very low. 

Antonio: Well, uh, uh, at a large scale. So -

Kate: What about, what are the cogs for your first 5,000 units? 

Antonio: Oh, it's higher than that. Definitely higher. So I'm talking about quantity, like we're projecting a hundred million ARR in the five years. So about 400,000 units. So basically following the playbook of Oura and Whoop. 

Kate: And then there's a subscription component?

Antonio: Yeah exactly. Yeah. So the subscription right now in our financial model is $12.99. So it's somewhere between Oura and Whoop. Oura is lower subscription, but higher price of the hardware. We wanna be a little bit more like Whoop because we wanna innovate more on the software. We are more of a software company, really. The future of Awear, our vision is to continuously monitor your brain. Every thoughts, every emotion relies on our brain functioning well and we go our entire life and we wait until we have depression, anxiety. Or neurodegenerative disease. So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to bring brain wave monitoring to everyday life. 

Ben: I think it's very unique, very compelling. Is there IP in the, both hardware and software? 

Antonio: Yeah. Yeah. There is IP in the hardware itself. In the form factor in the ear cuff. 

Ben: Is that protected? 

Antonio: Yeah, we have. Yeah, we have - 

Ben: So nobody else can measure EEG with an ear cuff device? 

Antonio: Yes. 

Ben: That's powerful.

Antonio: I'm really good with patents. I've myself handwritten, all my patents and, uh, communicate with office actions. So I know the patent process really well. 

Ben: I’m curious on the, if you can give a little bit of the fundraising history. You mentioned Techstars. Has there been any other capital raised thus far? 

Antonio: Thus far, no. So just a, a few small checks from Angels, but mainly Techstars. We build this hardware and the mobile app through Techstars.

Charles: What can you do with the 700K? Like, what does that enable you to do? 

Antonio: So we want to hit a couple more product development milestones on the hardware and on the algorithm side. And then we'll launch a Kickstarter in June. And then from there we'll do a, a seed round that is gonna be larger and it will take us to production. 

Elizabeth: So there have been others who have tried to measure stress. Not with this method, not with EEG, but I was a customer of a product a few years ago, so much earlier. I would say. But I think one of the challenges that I realized is like, what do you tactically do with the information? It was actually pretty good at like vibrating whenever I was stressed. But aside from someone to take a deep breath, like, I think one of the shortcomings is what is that final step? And that's something that a device cannot solve.So I think there's this question then of, you know, the retention on it. I don't wear it anymore 'cause it doesn't actually solve a problem.

Let’s all take a big deep breath in. We’ll be right back. 

Elizabeth: Aside from someone to take a deep breath, like, I think one of the shortcomings is what is that final step? And that's something that a device cannot solve. So I think there's this question then of, you know, the retention on it. I don't wear it anymore 'cause it doesn't actually solve a problem.

Antonio: Mm-hmm. 

Elizabeth: It just interprets the signals well. So I think this is the question that I have of, okay, let's say that you have great form factor, great accuracy on this, but like, how do you actually solve the problem of stress, depression, mental health, et cetera? 

Antonio: So there's two things. Our app has two different features. One is the, if you wish, the vitamin. And the vitamins that Awear gives you is your stress. You had an just an emotional breakdown, which actually happened to me December 24th, Awear was telling me I have a week long of stress and look at the patterns, look at the color on my app. That is a clear pattern. Like this is a, this is not good. And I said, you know what? I'm just gonna take a break and recharge. 

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm. 

Antonio: And then there is the painkiller. And the painkiller we are implementing with a conversational AI coach. Think of it as a life coach that is always on your phone and knows your emotions minute by minute, day by day. Week by week, month by month, knows you really intimately. That's the subscription. 

Kate: So I'm gonna double down on this kind of query. 'cause to me this is sort of critical. Like if the Oura Ring tells you you're stressed and the Apple Watch can tell you you're stressed, like why are people gonna understand your signal differently? Not from a scientific perspective, but from a social perspective. Like, it's like if this thing that I already have is telling me that I'm stressed, like why is this so much better? 

Antonio: Yeah. So Oura ring tells me that I'm stressed when I go for a run, and actually I'm physiologically stressed. 

Kate: Got it. Okay. 

Antonio: But I'm not -

Ben: Mentally

Kate: So it’s not -

Antonio: Not mentally stressed.

Ben: It's measuring, it’s measuring - 

Antonio: It’s like really octagonal.

Kate: Got it, got it, got it. So they're, when they use the term stress, they, they mean it differently, understood, understood.

Ben: It's body stress maybe from a physical - 

Antonio: Exactly. Because it's a, it's a measure of HRV. We tap into the central nervous system, which is where everything originates. And so we can have much, much higher accuracy. The real time component of EEG is phenomenal. We give you a sample of your emotion every second so you can actually self-regulate. 

Elizabeth: So, okay, so let's hone in on this specific thing. Like when I think about my user experience with that other device that I kind of alluded to, the reason I stopped using it is, it was actually alerting me a lot. 

Charles: A lot. Yeah. 

Elizabeth: Like for example, when I would go through pitch decks and then reject all these founders, that's actually very stressful to me. I don't enjoy rejecting people, but it is part of the job. It's not something I can change. And I think every day in our life there are stressful things that you can't change, like. You come on The Pitch Show, you get nervous, right? And so it's a little bit like the old version of security cameras, like when someone would move, like if your security camera is constantly, you know, telling you there's an intruder that's not helpful. What is helpful is looking at the big holistic picture, like you had kind of mentioned, it sounds like in your app, what you're doing is you see on a micro level, okay, you're stressed now, but pay attention to the fact that you've been stressed like this for a week. I think what I'm trying to understand, and this is more of a user experience problem than anything, like, how do you signal enough to the user that they're stressed but not too much such that it's actually not useful?

Antonio: So that's a key thing of, of this product, you know, user experience is everything, and it's gonna be one of the first hire that we're gonna do for user experience. But right now we're just, we, we acquired a lot of data from our customers. Like, things that we learn is, especially founders. Our journey is not easy, you all know. So we hear founders telling us, sometimes I'm explosive with my team. I wish I had something in the moment that could tell me, hey, slow down. You might actually create more damage in your team. So if we can self-regulate ourselves in the moment, maybe we can have a much better meeting with our team. There is that component. But I agree, uh, how we present that it's gonna be critical in this product. 

Charles: So I think I'm out on this one. I just think single variable wearables are really hard now. I was probably more bullish on them five or 10 years ago when we didn't have as many things. And this, I think, is a case where like, I do not doubt the sincerity of your beliefs, and I don't doubt the science behind what you're doing. I just keep asking myself how big of an audience of people do I think will pay the price plus subscription for this to get these insights on a regular basis. And I can't get my arms around a big enough audience doing that at scale to build the scale of business that I'd want to see. So I'm out. But your dedication to solving a really important problem is admirable, and you've clearly got the scientific chops to back it up.

Ben: I am interested because I think the opportunity here is really what you look for as an angel investor, which is like some incredible asymmetric upside. And today no one that I'm seeing is walking around with an ear cuff that's measuring their mental wellbeing. And I think if we can just close our eyes, imagine the world 10 years from now. Is there an outside shot? That, you know, X percentage of the population would be wearing this and wanting the data and I think that's a, you know, non-zero chance of happening. And I think. You are arguably one of the best people, if not maybe the best person in the world to actually solve this problem. So there's perfect founder market fit. My average check historically is around $50,000 so that's kind of where I stand here. 

Antonio: Thank you 

Kate: I am out for this round. Which is interesting 'cause I love the vision. I actually love the vision. I want it to exist in the world. But it's one of those things where I think I'm the victim of my own investment experience, where I've done so many things that are adjacent and seen the difficulty of those company journeys. And sometimes that happens where you sort of know too much. Like I've done a lot of hardware, I've done a lot of consumer hardware, I've done a lot of consumer digital health. 

Antonio: Yeah. 

Kate: And so in my mind I can see all the ways that this fails. 

Antonio: Yeah. 

Kate: Right. That doesn't mean that you will fail. But I think for me, in this seat, it's really hard for me to get over my experience because it is very challenging to build a consumer hardware product. What I will say on top of that is I feel really committed to meeting with you again to share the, kind of the bullet list of, here's all the things that I've seen go wrong, because I wanna see it go right for you. I really do. I mean, I live in San Francisco. I'm friends with all the weird biohackers, like they've got magnets implanted in their hands. Like it's getting weird folks. And like I, I do believe that this brain body connection, it is happening. And I would love for this to exist. I really would. 

Antonio: Beautiful. Thank you. I appreciate it. 

Kate: Yeah 

Elizabeth: Where are you in the fundraise? 

Antonio: So the first one was Techstars. We collecting checks from, uh, friends and family but pretty much starting right now 

Elizabeth: Have terms been set or not yet?

Antonio: We are looking at the 7 million cap. But, um, we are very open. 

Elizabeth: I see. So, um, I really like you. I really like what you're doing. I think this is a new category. I think, you know, people are becoming much more aware of their mental health. Five to 10 years ago, people didn't think of it as like, in the same way as a physical injury. But I think that times are changing and I agree with you that actually this needs to be a, a separate device and I like your approach and the form factor. So I would like to invest. Seven is gonna be too high for me, but I would do it at five cap $150k. 

Antonio: Okay. Thank you. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. 

Antonio: Awesome. 

Elizabeth: Thank you. 

Charles: Great. 

Ben: Congrats. 

Charles: Thank you. 

Antonio: Thank you. 

Josh: Do you wanna do that? 

Antonio: Yes.

Kate: All right. 

Antonio: I'm excited to have you on board Elizabeth, I know a lot about you and your background and so I'm really excited to have you as part of the team.

Elizabeth: Thank you. 

Antonio: Cool. Thanks. 

Charles: Thank you. [claps] 

Antonio: Great meeting you. 

Ben: Great meeting you

Antonio: Can I get my prototype? 

Kate: Oh, of course

Antonio: Thank you guys so much, bye

Ben: Is that a, is that a fund investment?

Elizabeth: Yeah. 

Ben: Amazing. That's fantastic. 

Kate: Exciting

Ben: That's great. 

Josh: Okay, I did not think you guys were interested in that deal. Like watching it, I was like, they're just not into it. I was thinking the vibes were off

Ben: But Elizabeth keeps a really great poker face. 

Kate: I know. 

Ben: I think that my, you've probably heard that feedback before but -

Elizabeth: Actually no. Some people here said that I sit up in my seat. 

Josh: No, you lean in and you ask a hundred questions. 

Ben: No tells, no tells

Josh: You didn't ask … You asked a couple, but -

Ben: Charles, what do you think?

Charles: I feel like she, when she knows that she's out, she's out. 

Ben: Yeah. 

Charles: And if she's, hasn't said she's out, she's still in, that's my experience working with her. 

Ben: Got it, got it. 

Ben: He's clearly like the quintessential like founder market fit. Right.

Kate: I disagree. 

Charles: I really did not like this one. I deeply dislike this one

Ben: But his background, of like 300 patents

Elizabeth: He doesn’t have like an industrial design background

Charles: I deeply disagree, He doesn’t have, you could tell, I deeply dislike this one, I deeply dislike this one

Ben: Fair but from a technology standpoint 

Charles: Yeah.

Elizabeth: Uh…

Ben: No?

Elizabeth: No. 

Ben: Alright.

Charles: I think the two people here who've done the most hardware investing are having the most strong visceral reactions 

Kate: We're stressed

Ben: You don’t think he can actually build the product and get it -

Kate: It's not 

Ben: in customer's hands or what… 

Elizabeth: I think his production road is gonna be a lot harder 'cause he doesn't have that experience. Even though he worked at -

Charles: telecom -

Elizabeth: wherever, it's not the same. 

Kate: Completely different. 

Elizabeth: and that was actually my hesitation for a while in this but like, it also depends on the app. Like it comes back to the user experience of the app, which I haven't seen. 

Josh: Yeah. 

Elizabeth: But I guess like quickly across the table, I don't know, it looked kind of interesting.

Josh: Yeah, it's, it's like bare bones, but it works 

Kate: Well, and sometimes that's the beauty of pre-seed. Like, I want this thing to exist in the world It's just very, very early and that can mean that there's opportunity. 

Elizabeth: And I think there's a lot of market pull on the trend. 

Josh: Yeah. It does seem like something like this should exist at some point. 

Elizabeth: I think people would buy it in a rough form factor if it worked also

Josh: Especially in San Francisco.

Elizabeth: Yeah. I mean people for crying out loud wore Google Glass. 

Josh: Okay, let's go eat lunch. 

Antonio walked out of the pitch room with two offers, $150K at a 5 mil post from Elizabeth and $50k from Ben. The stress of the pitch is over, but the stress of diligence is coming up after this.

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Welcome back. A few weeks after the show, Antonio was made aware that Ben would be passing for now because he was in-between funds. But Elizabeth hopped on a call with Antonio. She had one big question remaining.

Elizabeth: We didn't get a chance on the pitch to go through the product, so I don't know if you have like a demo or something.

Antonio: Yeah. Of, of course. Yeah. Basically what it is, is that you have the ear cuff that is streaming data to the mobile app. And so you can see my live EEG data here. This is specifically the arousal level. It's one of the two dimensions. And so by analyzing the EEG data with machine learning, we can map what emotions you are experiencing in the moment. And then the second part of the app is more like the history, so you can really track throughout the day. How do you feel? This is very, very much similar to what typical biometrics by Oura Ring or Apple watch.

And then you can scroll through through your calendar and see how you did throughout the month. And then finally we have added this new feature, which is an AI coach. And basically, the AI coach combines these EEG data with your contextual data to provide you personalized recommendations to enhance your wellbeing. So think of it as a life coach that you can talk to and knows your emotions throughout your life 

Elizabeth: mm-hmm. 

Antonio: It's much more precise than a therapist or a life coach. But of course we don't see it as a replacement to that. We see more like an introduction to therapy and mental wellness. 

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm. Well, so I made you an offer on the show. That offer is still out there. I'm curious if you have any questions for me and whatnot. 

Antonio: I think that's it. What do you think are the next steps from here?

Elizabeth: um, yeah, I, so I can send you our onboarding checklist later today. 

Antonio: Fantastic. Yeah, and I'll follow up, uh, right away.

Elizabeth: Okay. Awesome.

A week later, Elizabeth signed & wired 150k, and The Pitch Fund signed and wired too. 50k alongside Hustle Fund.

Since the show, Antonio has raised an additional 100k, and he’s still looking to raise 400 more to close out the round. But the biggest update is… Awear is no longer an ear cuff! The form factor has changed. It’s a patch completely hidden behind the ear. It can be worn 24/7 and track your sleep too.

If you want to be one of the first people to test it out, you can get on the waitlist at awear.us - that’s a-w-e-a-r dot US. And be on the lookout for the Kickstarter launch by the end of the year.

No offer to invest in Awear is being made to the listening audience on today’s show. But you can join our private newsletter for LPs. Where you’ll get access to the deals we’re doing behind the scenes.

So, if you’re an accredited investor, you can apply to join at thepitch.fund

Subscribe to The Pitch right now, and turn on notifications so you don’t miss an episode. If you enjoyed today’s show, be sure to hit that like button. See you next time.

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This episode was made by me, Josh Muccio, Lisa Muccio, Anna Ladd, Enoch Kim, and Jackie Papanier. With deal sourcing by Peter Liu, John Alvarez, and Phoebe Sun.

Music in this episode is by The Muse Maker, Breakmaster Cylinder, Fields of Ethera, Memory Palace, and The Brow.

The Pitch is made in partnership with the Vox Media Podcast Network.