In 2023, Tayla Cannon immigrated to the United States from Australia in search of a job in a city she had never seen before.
“I don't have any family, I don't have any friends, I just have a fresh start,” she told TechCrunch. Suffering from chronic back pain, she began her career in physical therapy because she believed it could help make a difference in the lives of others. However, the traditional physical therapy model never quite appealed to her.
She moved to interventional cardiology, but her disillusionment grew even greater.
She said she uses a physical rehabilitation model that is “localized, reactive, and volume-based in nature.”
Meanwhile, in her spare time, she became a content creator, sharing her perspective online about “active” and “holistic” ways for people to get rid of their pain.
It took on a life of its own.
She currently has more than 130,000 followers on Instagram and runs a company called Athletic Rebuild, which provides rehabilitation and performance coaching for athletes, and a platform called Rebuildr, a HIPAA-compliant coaching app to help rehabilitation professionals run their own businesses online, scheduled to launch early next year.
“I wasn't trying to start a business. I was just using the internet to help people reimagine what care looks like.”
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Cannon and her work caught the attention of Slow Ventures, which announced on Tuesday that it had invested $1.1 million in a seed round. She was one of the first creators to receive a check from Slow Ventures' $60 million Creator Fund, which aims to help content creators and influencers make an impact online.
Cannon said she had no plans when she started sharing her thoughts on social media in 2024, but then decided to make this her career. “There was no strategy, no roadmap, and certainly no business model behind it,” she said. She believes in what most content creators do for their success: staying authentic and sharing authentic thoughts without filters.
However, expanding your brand on social media is not without its challenges. Her social media presence, and by extension her brand, was growing rapidly, which was both a good thing and a problem. She quickly faced the need to understand business logic, consumer insights, and content strategy to connect with new audiences. “None of this is taught in medicine,” she continued. “We are trained to help people, not to build brands.”
The turning point came when I actually realized that I was the bottleneck in my business. “I couldn't continue to scale something relying solely on me. I needed to build something that could grow without me,” she said, adding that she ended up hiring people to help with the project.
She also grew her strategies as she moved from just talking about what was broken in the rehab world and started working on solutions to fix it. Rebuildr aims to “completely transition from localized, reactive care to a proactive, holistic mode,” Cannon said, “combining consumer solutions, clinicians, education, and software, all delivered at scale.”
She was introduced to the Slow Ventures team through a friend who invited her to one of the company's events in Austin. “I had no intention of raising money,” she said. “I wasn't pitching. I wasn't setting up the deck.” Still, she connected with Slow investor Megan Lightcap to talk about what she's building at Rebuildr.
“The conversation sparked something,” Cannon said, adding that Slow helped her “imagine a bigger version of Rebuilder” than what she had envisioned.
Other personal trainer software options include TrainHeroic, Trainerize, and Everfit. Rudder hopes his product, Rebuildr, will fundamentally reshape the rehabilitation industry.
“We want to make quality rehabilitation accessible anywhere in the world, not limited by geography, insurance, or 30-minute appointment times,” she said.