Acute XR

Esade Business School

Industry: Healthcare and Gaming

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Dominik Kirchdorfer

Brief Description of Solution: Acute XR creates fun, immersive and therapeutic video games for children and adolescents suffering from mental health conditions. Our first game, Calm Quest VR uses your own heart as a game controller and transports you into a magical world where you can unleash the magic within yourself to shape and heal the world around you and thereby learn how to regulate your own emotions.

Funding Dollars: $87,000

What led you to launch this venture? My co-founder Andreas Lenz, his brother, and I met 12 years ago playing an online video game. We teamed up and worked exceptionally well together. Afterward we chatted and learned that we not only came from the same country but lived just a street away from each other. We instantly became best friends and maintained that relationship over all this time, despite living in different countries as we pursued our respective careers in social impact and game design. During the pandemic, we found ourselves living a short distance away again and spent a lot of time locked in and discussing everything from our plans for the future to our respective traumas. We felt a strong need to change how media was created. We also wanted to make something that would not just entertain, but also help people, especially if they were negatively affected by personal experiences or external events such as the pandemic. We had a rough idea and a long-term vision of where we wanted to go, so we agreed that I would be the CEO and pursue an MBA to learn everything necessary to launch our venture.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? We have completed a clinical trial that shows our game reduces the symptoms of chronic stress and anxiety by over 30% after just playing for 10 sessions over 10 weeks. We also know that these results are sustained even three months after the patients stopped playing. We incorporated in the United States in May 2024 and in August graduated from the i.Lab incubator program at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Shortly after, we went on to join the nationally-ranked Health Wildcatters accelerator in Dallas, Texas. We are now in the middle of raising our pre-seed round and are also closing some exciting partnerships within the healthcare ecosystem for when we hit the market next year.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? Startups and entrepreneurs thrive on uncertainty. If everything was certain it would be stale and boring. To innovate, you need uncertainty. But you also need to limit it, so as not to run against an invisible wall after having walked a mile in one direction. Figuring out what it is we want to do, and how to do it right, is the toughest challenge. This is especially true if you have lots of ideas and enthusiastic people around you who all push you in different directions. We have solved this issue by doing two things concurrently: iterating and gathering data. This concept is nothing new: you can find it in design thinking and agile development frameworks. We kept on gathering new data from various sources and developed several ideas simultaneously We also kept on pushing them forward, bit by bit and looked for signs of acceleration in any of them. If we hit a wall with one, or started to slow down, we would pivot and focus on the remaining ideas. Eventually, we had a winner, as well as a treasure trove of half-baked ideas and projects that could potentially serve as inspiration or become viable in a different form in the future.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? The MBA was essential. I had run non-profits before, but I was sorely lacking skills in accounting and finance. I also struggled with business lingo which until then sounded like complete gibberish to me. I had also never raised funds before, nor had I really understood how the startup process truly worked. The Esade MBA, in particular, puts a lot of emphasis on entrepreneurship in the core curriculum. At the same time, the eWorks ecosystem surrounding it is excellent to get you started. When I arrived at UVA Darden for my exchange, I felt very prepared already and then I learned so much more via the i.Lab program and Batten Institute resources. I even won the local Venture Capital Investment Competition with my amazing team and Darden sent us to New York for the regional competition. This gave me a great insight into the minds and processes of investors doing their due diligence. By the time we were accepted into the accelerator and had to go through due diligence, the lawyer on the other side just looked at me and said “Yeah, these documents are all in order. Nothing more to say, you know what you’re doing.”

What founder or entrepreneur inspired you to start your own entrepreneurial journey? How did he or she prove motivational to you? Having also gone to film school, I see the parallels between film and business. I’d have to say George Lucas is my inspiration. He is a rebel, and an innovator through and through. He made Star Wars when he was 25 years old. He was rejected by every major studio, until finally 20th Century Fox gave him a shot and gave him a little funding to see what he could do – much like first-time entrepreneurs experience during their first raise.

Lucas didn’t just make a successful blockbuster. He revolutionized the entire industry by surrounding himself with other outlier geniuses, like Steven Spielberg, Ralph McQuarrie, and Ben Burtt, who each in their own way reimagined their part of cinema. John Williams became the inspiration and influence for several generations of film composers, Ben Burtt created Skywalker Sound, the sound company that works on 99% of today’s movies. Let’s not forget THX and ILM. Lucas spawned half a dozen companies from a single product that shaped the entire industry from the 70s until today. He also locked in the merchandising rights for his IP, allowing him to profit immensely from its success, enabling him to pursue those very ventures in his portfolio. That is the entrepreneurial story that made me believe that anything is possible, if you have vision, perseverance and surround yourself with the right people.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? It’s difficult to pick just one class because several were instrumental. Venture Velocity at UVA Darden, taught by Jim Zufoletti, was a fantastic place to create a support group of fellow entrepreneurs (fundamental for any entrepreneur!) and to have the time during class to really dig into your venture. At Esade I believe our Finance class taught by Gloria Batllori had the biggest value for me. I am definitely a poet and not a quant. Heck, I have a master’s in creative writing. However, Gloria taught me that the numbers are there to tell a story, much like I would with words and it’s just about understanding what the numbers are trying to tell us. I ended up getting a perfect grade in Finance. While there 100% better people at Finance than me, I most likely had the biggest learning curve in that class and overcame a crippling fear of financial statements.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? This is another question I cannot answer with a single name. It wouldn’t be fair! I already mentioned Jim Zufoletti. In addition, Daniel Blaseg, Jan Brinckmann, Davide Rovera, Bob Creeden and Les Alexander were each incredibly helpful, supportive; they gave me valuable lessons about entrepreneurship that helped shape me into the founder I am today. Whether it was in class, on a class trip, or an extracurricular event, they always had my back.

Other professors like Luis Vives and Vivian Riefenberg, to name two examples from Esade and Darden each, have been incredibly generous with their time and their personal networks. They made introductions and give me additional feedback and knowledge I needed to succeed. I look forward to staying connected and catching up often with them!

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? I feel that I have been very fortunate in the MBA path I have taken. Both the Esade MBA and the eWorks ecosystem have given me all the tools I needed to go down an entrepreneurial path right after graduation. The core curriculum is already very entrepreneurial. However, eWorks takes it to a whole other level with weekly meetups with founders in Barcelona, the power up series with lectures designed specifically for founders, as well as the incubator and accelerator programs. Barcelona is also a growing hub of entrepreneurship that helps to nurture any entrepreneurial ambitions.

2023 was a really hard year for startups raising funds, so I decided to do an exchange to the United States before I graduate. UVA Darden had been one of my top choices when I applied for the MBA and I had unfortunately been waitlisted due to my relatively low GMAT score. Through Esade, I had a chance to at least visit and as it turns out, I aced all my Darden classes. More importantly, everyone at Darden was incredibly friendly and welcoming, really making me feel like I was part of the family and turned me into a proud alumnus. I had the opportunity to fully immerse myself in everything the school had to offer from classes and clubs to competitions and the incubator program. This allowed me to extend my stay there way beyond graduation and eventually catapulted me into a US accelerator program. I cannot stress how important this particular path was for me. Esade gave me all the fundamentals I needed for entrepreneurship and Darden then allowed me to hit the ground running in the States and raise our first funds. I could not have asked for a better experience.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? We want to turn mental healthcare into play. Our vision is that it will become completely normal to seek out therapy and to do so in the form of video games. We need to stop pretending like medicine has to be this ghastly thing that has to hurt or be uncomfortable to work. It should be a fun and exciting process to get better! Most importantly, we want to avoid the tragedy of almost all medical innovations: black boxing. Too many innovations are bought up and shelved forever. We’re not saying we won’t ever exit, but we will make damn sure that our products remain on the market and kids get to keep playing and getting better, because we’re doing it for them. There would be far easier ways to make a lot of money and entrepreneurship is the path of most risk and resistance.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? You expect that once you have that idea that clicks into place, you’ve got it all figured out – but that’s not true. Even after six pivots, you’ll likely still be changing a whole lot about your business and product down the line. Entrepreneurship is definitely a fluid phase state. You’re constantly moving and changing everything, because you get new information or the market shifts. And even if you are told this – even if you already know this – a part of you will always think, ‘Oh after we cross this mountain, it’ll be much better and easier.’ But it doesn’t really get easier, you’re constantly falling out of the frying pan and into the fire; you just develop fire-resistant skin over time. You have to. This isn’t a short-term journey. Most exits happen 5-10 years down the line and every achievement is greeted by a hundred new problems. As a result, you have to accept and embrace this reality and happily walk into the unknown, learn how to make good decisions with limited information and keep inviting change with open arms. This journey can be scary and anxiety inducing, but it can also be freeing and more fulfilling than anything else in this world. You just have to let yourself enjoy the ride.

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