Wellest
Dave Sekowski
Dave Sekowski left a career working for Intel and Apple as a product manager to start a business merging his two passions — tech and wellness.
The result is Wellest Inc., the San Francisco-founded company and member of the initial cohort of Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth Accelerator at The University of North Texas Health Science Center.
Sekowski, the CEO and founder, and his development team, led by Chris Skowera, designed an expert artificial intelligence that optimizes and automates health coaching in real-time. The platform is able to take patient variables with demographic information, lab results, diet and daily exercise, and supplement routines to generate personalized step-by-step guidance on how one should sleep, eat, exercise, take supplements and medications to treat disease.
An open end-to-end health platform tracked and observed from the patient’s smart phone.
“I got into health tech coming out of Intel and Apple and wanting to bring deep tech and user-centered design to health,” Sekowski says. “It started because I wanted to go beyond health data collection, summarization, and analysis to the actual ‛so what?’ — in other words, what deeply personalized and real-time guidance does someone need to help them be the most well they can be.”
Sekowski, 38, a Chicago resident, has 15 years of experience in high-performance computing and consumer technology as well as a lifetime interest in health, fitness, and sports. He has studied and trained in sports performance nutrition, training, and supplementation.
Sekowski learned about the Techstars program through a friend from college who had had success with his company through another Techstars cohort.
The Techstars Physical Health accelerator is a three-month program that focuses on the challenges and opportunities in the world of physical health. Techstars surrounds companies with mentors and a network of corporate partners and investors. It also provides fundraising opportunities, workshops, and other resources.
“Techstars was a great experience for us,” Sekowski says. “It did exactly what we hoped it would do, which was to help us complete our pivot from a consumer focus to a business focus with us selling to providers and health systems instead of to consumers directly.
“It helped us make a ton of mentor, fellow founder, and investor connections. It also helped us to win our first pilot with UNT HSC. And it gave us a wonderful opportunity to present at our Techstars Demo Day and tell our story.”
Tell their story, Sekowski did. He relayed the story of the death of his mother from complications from nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.
“Really, this is about my mom,” Sekowski said during his presentation. “She died from an entirely preventable disease. She had high liver enzymes for over 20 years, but because she was at a healthy weight and didn’t drink alcohol, those were ignored. Yearly physicals and occasional blood work do not tell the entire story.”
So many, he cautions, are living with poor metabolic health, which leads to high blood sugar, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. All of those leading to deadly diseases — what he calls is “truly the pandemic of modern living.”
Sekowski says he has had success winning providers focused on improving treatment and outcomes on those very metabolic health matters.
“We’re seeing great opportunities to improve quality of care and outcomes while saving providers time while increasing revenue from their existing operations, staff, and patients.”