It's been an incredible year. Although like many startup Founders, I am looking forward to this festive holiday break for a chance to re-energise!
Some of the significant highlights this year sit squarely with my team and I am fortunate to have such a wealth of talent.
One of our key achievements has been the modification and refinement of the Ripple design over the past year. This has been widely tested and the feedback has been positive - although we are always looking for more people to test the product with!
We launched our Investor Raise just recently and feedback has been phenomenal - we’re feeling very confident.
In fact, for anyone that wants to know more - please check out our funding platform here.
Another exciting development is our Technology Demonstration Day planned for early in the New Year... It’s a chance for our current and potential new investors and partners to test and view the product and meet the Ripple team. We will share the venue and date nearer the time
We have also been collaborating with the exciting new Sports Lab at Southampton Solent University, which was of course my own University - and we’re about to embark on a new student research project with them too.
But to reflect back to the beginning of 2024. We began refining our Ripple MVP prototype in January and tested our device with a multitude of athletes and Diabetics. Up to that point, most of our testing had been lab based. These new real-world trials have been running throughout the year.
The process enabled us to gather data, analyse the results and continue to adapt Ripple over the Summer. It helped us test our signal processing methods and by using AI machine learning, it gave us the opportunity to understand what we need to develop and complete. For example, it’s helped us identify how to interact with smart watches and trackers and what size the device needs to be.
We won a grant this year from SETsquared to help us add team resources and help us progress this essential data crunching.
Ultimately we have now learned what and how to finalise everything we need and get Ripple ready for market launch in 2025.
Significantly too, support and interest from the national and international medical and health sector has been strong. We have a planned project with University Hospital, Southampton as well as an on-going project with the University of Southampton looking at children with ADAH. As well, we have been contacted by the Acute Kidney Disease team looking at hydration monitoring using Ripple.
Our ongoing relationship with Health Innovation Wessex has been effective. They have continued to support and assist us with our endeavours. Particularly with the team at the Health Sciences University.
Also we launched our new website at the beginning of the year that enabled us to conduct some further market research. This enabled us to understand our core customer profile. Elite athletes are a natural customer for us and the product is already in great demand. Monitoring lactate in endurance athletes is key to our product service and we are looking at how to measure lactate in athletes using the high performance Norwegian Training method.
Potentially, our next area to focus on is women’s health - focusing on pregnancy and menopause health.
In the Autumn, we began to develop our Investor Deck and of course our Investor Raise is now live. We have investors waiting in the wings and we’re hoping to achieve our required investment funding before April next year. More details here. https://www.myripple.co.uk/articles/why-are-wearables-the-future-for-human-health.
We’re also expecting to progress and launch some of our research projects and further develop retail partner opportunities when we have our market ready product. These include working with existing sports tech monitoring tools that will help accelerate our speed to market.
We’re excited. There’s a huge amount going on! We cannot wait to get into 2025 and build on the achievements to date.
Rod Lane, Ripple Founder