07/19/2020
Hello,
It is with sincere regret that we inform you that RistCall LLC is officially shutting down permanently as of 18th July 2020. It is our utmost priority to inform you about this decision as you are one of our most regarded stakeholders.
After having been through an eye-opening hospital experience in 2013, with support from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia healthcare community, we founded RistCall. In the last 6 years, we have been through incubators and accelerators to grow the project, streamline our focus, and maximize the benefit to all of our stakeholders. We were supported by internationally recognized healthcare institutions, venture capitalists, subject matter experts, and successful entrepreneurs. Our innovation has been recognized as a front runner in disrupting healthcare nursing workflow and elderly care.
It takes a village to raise a startup. It took a group of communities across countries to support RistCall. Our Innovation wouldn't have been possible without trust and investments from well-recognized organizations such as CMU Project Olympus, CMU OFEF, Dreamit Health, Penn Medicine, IBC, BFTP SEP, Cirquare LLC, Zeroto510K, Parallel18, NJIT Health IT Connections, UMass VDC, Harbinger Group, Mobile Village, HITLAB, NJTC, Innovation works, PLSG, Leech Tishman, Cherian Law offices, Iandoli Desai & Cronin P.C, TIE Pittsburgh, eMerge Americas, MIT 100K, Temple University, Science Center, and several friends & family investors. The last 6 years have been one of the most hustling and gratifying experiences I have had, which I will be cherishing for the rest of my life. I am extremely proud of all that we have accomplished in these glorious years and couldn't be more thankful to all of you, who believed in us and invested in the future of this company.
Unfortunately, in this unprecedented time and unpredictable future, due to the current financial climate, the running of RIstCall has been difficult as the rest of us in the economy. I am sharing some of my learnings during this incredible journey.
1. Healthcare is highly regulated and it is difficult to bring innovation into the market unless the startup has some unfair advantages.
2. Funding: RistCall raised little over $500K to build and test the first MVP and prove market demand. While we still believe the market exists, with insufficient funding, projects like RistCall are not sustainable to enter and validate a complex, regulated market. Healthcare hardware startups need significant funding. A scrappy startup approaches to the giant and complex problems are not sustainable. This has been my experience.
3. Hardware and regulations: Even with off the shelf devices we were able to get FDA Class II 510k exemption and enforcement discretion, HIPAA compliance. But we couldn't get UL1069 & UL 2560 approval to replace existing solutions.
4. Regulations didn't evolve with technology. Current regulations are for wired healthcare communications but not wireless. Had we built devices from scratch by targeting regulations, it could have minimized risks associated with healthcare regulations.
With our passion and hard work, we dedicated ourselves to RistCall for over 5 years while forgoing market scale wages. We generated over $100k in revenue even before we even built our first MVP in the first 3 years. Team and Market have never been a problem. We are confident that the impact we made on the healthcare community has sparked other types of innovations in this industry. I would continue to be vocal and voice of this innovation and would provide all levels of support to the future of this community.
Thank you for your business and continued support.
Sincerely
Srinath V
