Get to know Francisca Canais & Rita Maçorano, founders of Nevaro Tech
Ever wondered how a startup gets started?
Today, we meet the inspiring duo behind Nevaro, a company that's using technology to tackle mental health challenges!
In this interview, Rita and Francisca, co-founders of Nevaro, share their journey - from meeting in Italy to building an app that's empowering people to take charge of their mental wellbeing.
Get ready for a dose of inspiration and some practical advice for aspiring entrepreneurs!
Q: Tell us about yourselves, how you met and decided to partner up. What’s Nevaro’s story?
We attended the same Bachelor in Biomedical Engineering, at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, but we actually first met in Italy while at our internships! Upon returning to Lisbon for our masters, we ended up in the same neurosciences class, where we were challenged to develop an idea for a biomedical technology that could improve any field of healthcare. We ended up in the same team and we started developing this idea of using Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality games to help overcome challenges in the current treatment for certain mental health disorders, namely phobias. This technology already existed in the market, however, our innovation was adding, in a novel methodology, biofeedback to the games - meaning that we collected the patients’ physiological activity (cardiac and brain activity), to classify the anxiety state and personalize the phobic exposure intensity in the games depending on that. Hence, psychologists/psychiatrists had access to a tool that enabled them to provide quantitative, personalized, and safe phobia therapy. After developing this prototype, we had the chance to test it in the Hospital of Beja, on our master thesis project, and we won first place in the entrepreneurship contest of TecLabs (the startup incubator of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon). After seeing all the positive feedback on our solution and witnessing its need in the market, alongside Professor Hugo Ferreira (our teacher at said neurosciences course), we decided to continue this work and founded Nevaro!
Q: Why was it so important for you to bring mental health awareness into the workplace? And what are the biggest challenges you’ve faced?
As we mentioned before, we started our journey in the clinical setting, helping patients and mental health professionals. However, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, we noticed that the workplace setting was also in major need of mental health awareness and coping tools. Studies show that today more than half of companies' employees, in Portugal, are being affected by burnout. Furthermore, the average delay between the onset of the first symptoms of a mental health disorder and the moment when people seek medical care is 11 years - which shows that early-stage mental healthcare is highly needed! At Nevaro, we are empowering companies by providing them with the app HOLI, for mental health coping and burnout prevention of their teams. HOLI is the Personal Trainer for mental health, combining positive psychology with biofeedback technology. With our proprietary biofeedback model and emotional classification algorithms, built upon 5 years of research, HOLI personalizes the coping journey on the app to each user's needs, making mental healthcare accessible, user-centric and engaging. The biggest challenge we have been facing is stigma, which is endless when it comes to mental health, and we are fighting it with science - communication is key, and the results have been very positive!
Q: Building a startup business in Portugal must come with its own set of experiences. What is unique about the business environment here?
In Portugal. the tech scene around mental health is not as evolved as in the US or some other European countries, hence the challenges about awareness. Furthermore, the country’s policies usually are slow and difficult, which is a great challenge to startups. However, the entrepreneurial scene is booming, and there are several funds, incubators, investors, and accelerators out there to help startups! Another main challenge is to acquire qualitative and long-lasting customers, since the country, hence targeted markets, are small. We really see Portugal as our test-bed, but our ambition is to scale to other countries.
Q: What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who are passionate about building businesses that align with their values?
First of all, be willing to let your ego aside: if you’re starting a business, you don’t know everything about it yet - your potential customers do, so at the beginning be ready to listen a lot and talk less. It’s crucial to understand the customers’ needs, what jobs are they struggling to do, and how current solutions fail - find your differentiating power! Then, surround yourself with the right people to help you bring your vision to the market - team, advisors, incubators, R&D partners if that applies,... - go to events, network, create a community - no one makes it on their own! Also, make your product a priority - develop, test, listen to the users’ feedback, and then iterate - the higher the fit between your product and its users, the higher the chance of success you have. Lastly, make it personal - people love stories, so don’t be shy to let your personal stories out and show people why your business matters to you and what your values are!
Q: How do you approach finding a balance between work and personal life in your entrepreneurial journey?
At the beginning of our journey, this was a big challenge, especially since we created the startup during the Covid-19 pandemic - so it was easy to work until late every day and to use our work to distract ourselves from our personal lives, keeping busy and hustling, with almost no limitation. However, after months of almost burning out, we understood that, although we are entrepreneurs and of course wish to give our maximum potential and work to the company, if we want to be at our A-game we need to have a balanced life (proper vacations, a fixed schedule, have better boundaries between work and personal life). We work in the mental health field, so we started to really feel the need to take care of ourselves, take care of our own mental health - do sports, spend quality time with friends and family, eat well, and have proper me-time to rest. And we often talk about this with other entrepreneurs, since we see how easy it is to use our startups as an excuse to overlook our wellbeing and to put the use our super-hero cape above our personal lives, so we encourage others to take care of their mental health as fiercely as they take care of their startups :)
Feeling motivated to make a change? Rita and Francisca’s story is proof that anything is possible with passion and the right approach. Whether you're struggling with mental health yourself or looking for ways to support your team's wellbeing, Nevaro's app HOLI could be a game-changer.
Head over to their website to learn more and see if HOLI is the key to unlocking a happier, healthier you!
P.s - Voilà Yoga is a proud partner of this initiative! If you’re a Holi app user based in Lisbon, you can book your next Yoga class with us and benefit from a 30% discount rate :)
