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They built a billion-dollar start-up from their garage. Now they’re going again
By David Swan
They created one of Australia’s most valuable technology start-ups in a Brisbane garage – Go1 – an education platform most recently valued at $3 billion.
Now, Go1 co-founders Vu Tran and Andrew Barnes and entrepreneur Gopi Sara have unveiled their next company, OneMRI, which they say is Australia’s first and only national provider of whole-body MRI scans. They say it has a similarly sized growth opportunity to their prior start-up.
Existing Go1 investors and executives as well as clinicians and radiologists have poured a collective $2.5 million into OneMRI in a seed funding round to fuel its expansion nationally, amid rising demand from “health curious” individuals who want a full-body scan but don’t know where to turn.
OneMRI co-founders Vu Tran, Andrew Barnes and Gopi Sara.
In between running start-ups, Tran works as a general practitioner, and he said in an interview that OneMRI had been born out of a frustration in not knowing how or where to refer patients for MRI scans.
“It’s not covered by Medicare, and no one is catering for it,” Tran said. “There are all these machines out there that are underutilised, and there are a lot of people out there who want MRI scans. We’re that bridge.
“I’ve been a GP for 10 years and patients are more interested in wellness and their healthcare than they’ve ever been. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of focus in the Medicare system on sick care, not necessarily health care.”
Barnes spent nearly a decade as Go1 CEO before stepping down in August last year, though he still spends some time working at the company and he remains on its board. He started Go1 with Tran, a schoolmate, Chris Eigeland and Chris Hood in 2015 and that same year they were accepted into the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator Y Combinator.
Go1 co-founders and co-chief executives Chris Eigeland (second from left) and Andrew Barnes with Blinkist co-founders Tobias Balling (left), and Holger Seim, after the acquisition deal was sealed.
More than 10,000 organisations now use Go1 for staff training, and 50 million registered users have completed courses on the platform. Go1 executives are reported to be mulling an IPO and the company has an ambition to reach 1 billion learners globally.
Barnes said MRI scans traditionally took two hours, but his start-up had reduced that down to 45 minutes.
“What we want to do is get them down to $500 and 15 minutes. And the impact that you can have by helping someone identify something serious with their health four or five years before they’re symptomatic is profound. I think it’ll be like how we treat an annual skin check or a mammogram; we want it to be highly accessible for anyone who is curious about their health.”
Tran said starting a business this time around had been easier than it had been a decade ago with Go1.
“Being a bit more experienced means more of a laser focus in that we know what we want to get done and what we don’t want to do,” he said. “And we talk about this all the time: we know now not to sweat the small stuff. Once you do this a second time, or a third or fourth time, there’s less anxiety around things.”
International expansion is next on the horizon, according to Sara, who said OneMRI planned to offer services across Asia Pacific. The oversubscribed seed funding round attracted investment from OIF Ventures, TEN13, Antler, Salus Ventures, AfterWork Ventures, Archangel Ventures, Black Sheep Capital, Prtnr, Larsen Ventures and Tribe Global Ventures.
While the start-up’s whole-body imaging could detect over 500 potential conditions, it was designed to complement, not replace, diagnostic tests that might be more appropriate for specific medical concerns, he said.
“When we started, we didn’t know how much demand there would be, but all of a sudden, we’re now in Sydney, Melbourne, Gold Coast and Brisbane,” he said.
“Demand has been much bigger than we ever thought.”
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