LymeAlert

Industry: Healthtech

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Erin Dawicki, Brenda Ong, Michelle Ewy (all MIT Sloan Fellow MBAs 2024)

Brief Description of Solution: LymeAlert is the first home tick testing kit for the early detection of Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases.

Funding Dollars: $70,000 non-dilutive. Currently raising pre-seed round.

What led you to launch this venture?  As a healthcare provider, my patients delay care for all sorts of reasons. These include cost, not having access to a PCP, inability to take time off from work, and uncertainty about when to seek care. Lyme disease is something that responds to treatment much better when caught early. I came up with this idea during a program at MIT on entrepreneurship called Sandbox DHIVE where I was placed in the Lyme disease track. I get called all the time by patients who have found an embedded tick on themselves and are concerned. Being able to test the tick at home and know if it carries disease or not would greatly help patients know when to seek care, and helps providers to know when to appropriately prescribe prophylactic antibiotics.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture?  Building the right team of people who are equally passionate about solving this problem and creating a venture that has real impact has been incredibly gratifying. Yes, we have a working prototype and yes, we have amazing lab results. In the end, finding the right people to be in the trenches with makes this incredibly difficult thing we are doing so worth it.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? Every single person on this team had significant job opportunities at graduation. Every single person had to make a conscientious choice that building this company was something they were choosing over more lucrative immediate opportunities. We each took a different path in making that decision. We joined a really competitive and intense accelerator, MIT delta v, to help us solidify our decision as a team. We purposely waited to incorporate until we had some difficult conversations and worked out timelines and expectations that we each needed to agree to. Building a healthy company from day 1 – and codifying culture and company norms – was a difficult but worthy exercise.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? One thing I did not expect out of the MIT Sloan program was to have so much exposure to entrepreneurship. I had expected the normal business core classes, but did not expect how much of a “Choose your own adventure” MIT Sloan would be. We were really encouraged to experiment, take risks and get outside of our comfort zone. Additionally, the programs at MIT supporting entrepreneurship are amazing. We had so much access to mentors, office hours from industry experts, and access to competitive funding. There is no doubt in my mind that I would not have attempted building this company without the level of support we have received from programs such as the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, MIT Sandbox, the MIT PKG Center, the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and MIT I-Corps.

What founder or entrepreneur inspired you to start your own entrepreneurial journey? How did he or she prove motivational to you? Bindu Chanagala is a Sloan Fellow alumnus Class of ’23 who is also from the field of healthcare. She was paired with me during the admissions process. I was worried about the over an hour commute to MIT every day. She commuted even farther. I was worried about doing the MIT Sloan Fellows program as a mom of two school-age children. She has four. Having worked as a clinician for fifteen years, I had no idea how to become a startup co-founder. Bindu co-founded Nurtur with classmate Kristen Ellefson. If Bindu could do it, I could do it. Role models are important, and I could not have asked for a more supportive one.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it?  MIT loves numbers! Class 15.390 was titled New Enterprises while I attended MIT Sloan and was recently renamed Entrepreneurship 101. This class is run by Bill Aulet, managing director of the Trust Center, and Paul Cheek, executive director of the Trust Center. The course is an intense journey through the Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework. It is a LOT of work and forces you to work your way through the process with your startup idea with a team in a very accelerated way. The biggest lesson I learned was that anyone can be an entrepreneur. The second biggest takeaway was getting to work intensely with my co-founder, Brenda Ong, and realizing how complementary our work styles were to each other.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? MIT Sloan Prof. Duncan Simester who teaches Strategic Insights in the Sloan Fellows program, has been one of my best sounding boards. Even after graduating, he has made himself available to me for brainstorming ideas and feedback on the strategic decisions I am contemplating on behalf of our company development. Thanks to his courses and ongoing mentorship, I am constantly thinking of how to create, capture and deliver value and find niches.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? I am very grateful for the access I have to the startup ecosystems here in the Boston area. In particular, the MIT delta v program really helped us make significant strides that would have taken us much longer to do otherwise. We are currently raising our pre-seed round so that we can begin manufacturing soon. Thanks to delta v and the vigorous program we went through as part of their fundraising bootcamp, I know how to present our venture to investors and a wide variety of stakeholders. We only just started our fundraising and have already had significant progress on meeting our goal. That is 100% because of the support we have had from the MTC staff, mentors and Entrepreneurs-in-Residence.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. And tick diseases are spreading worldwide as climate change allows ticks to drastically expand their habitats. Our goal is to be the global leader in the early detection of vector borne diseases, both for human and animal markets. Our data collection via our paired computer vision app will allow for disease tracking and prediction. We hope to share that data with relevant stakeholders to aid in future research on mitigation and prevention and to help further reduce disease burden worldwide.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? I’m glad I didn’t know how hard or how much of an emotional rollercoaster it would be. I think that might have deterred me!  One important lesson I learned is getting to know as many of your classmates as possible to tap into their knowledge. Our MIT Sloan Fellows cohort is so diverse and experienced. The more open I am with what we are working on and the challenges we are facing, the more surprised I have been by my classmates who’ve ended up having real world experience in that exact thing! Build the network, develop meaningful relationships, and, as Bill Aulet likes to say, “Stealthy is unhealthy.”

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