With StartEd’s Hyper Accelerator, Floreo Develops a Strategy to Reach K-12 School Districts and Help Autistic Students
The StartEd Hyper Accelerator: five days of 1-on-1 networking, workshops, pitch positioning, and of, course, demo day. Learn More + Apply Today.
Floreo’s Virtual Reality Therapy Helps Autistic Kids Develop Real World Skills for Street Crossings, the Cafeteria, the Classroom, and More
Company Background
Amazon product executive and Floreo founder Vijay Ravindran got the idea for his company when his autistic son was transformed after putting on a virtual reality headset the first time. Vijay wondered how VR’s transformational power could be used to help the lives of kids all around the world--just like it did for his own son.
Two years later, the company’s virtual reality supplementary learning solution offers both clinicians and teachers hardware and software that helps kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) acquire social and communication skills. Floreo is now being used by parents, therapy practices, and in studies at the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and the National Institutes of Health.
The Challenge
While Floreo met early success at several clinics and in research studies at the National Institutes of Health and at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, they needed to quickly grow an important market: educational institutions from K-12 to higher education.
The company knew that learning how to penetrate these often bureaucratic organizations would be central to their success. Floreo turned to StartEd’s five day Hyper Accelerator program to help them to develop a go-to-market strategy to reach this largely untapped market.
“In just one week, we learned how to position our product for both higher ed and K-12 markets.”
The Solution
StartEd’s Hyper Accelerator enabled Floreo’s team to examine how to market effectively to both K-12 districts and higher education schools. They discovered that identifying incumbent channel partners was one possible way to more easily win bigger districts and shorten sales cycles.
With this key insight, they emerged from the accelerator with a much clearer understanding of how to scale their educational business and which channel partners to target for each region, size, and type of district--rather than trying to build an internal sales team and call on each district one at a time.
What the Team Said About StartEd
“The insights we learned at StartEd’s Hyper Accelerator forced us to think of things we just don't get the time to think about because we’re heads down trying to get into clinics.”
“We learned the importance of using established channel partners and how they can help us cross the finish line with large and midsize school districts versus trying to sell our solution directly and develop our own sales team.”
-Arif Poonawala, Product and Strategy Consultant, Floreo