mySugr launches in the US and gets Ferris on board

Yesterday, Austrian startup mySugr launched its diabetes app in the US.

The Vienna-based company developed a medical app for diabetics that turns the tedious monitoring of food intake and blood sugar into a game that even 6 year olds can use with an own junior version to answer to the increasing rate of diabetes. After a lengthy process of authorisation by the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which recently published their guidelines for the mHealth sector, mySugr could now enter this promising market.

Co-founded by Fredrik Debong, Frank Westermann, Gerald Stangl and Michael Forisch in 2011, mySugr currently have almost 14.000 users mainly in Austria, Germany and Italy. By the end of 2013, the team of 16, which to a big part is made up of diabetics and is based at Vienna’s Sektor5 hope to grow their customer base to 60.000 users by the end of the year, as Debong told inventures.eu last month.

Tim Ferris as advisor
The launch of the US subsidy represents yet another milestone for the successful medical startup. In 2011, mySugr emerged as the winner of TechCrunch at the Viennese Startup Week, earning the reputation of game changer for its work at the intersection of mobile, health and social gaming. After the product launch in April last year, mySugr partnered up with T-mobile and Sanofi and launched its junior version in April 2013.

What is more, mySugr recruited no other than the New York Times bestselling author Tim Ferris for its board of advisors. Ferris has experimented extensively with blood sugar levels for his Slow Carb Diet (featured in “The 4-Hour Body”), both on himself and countless others, and there is no surprise that he is a fan of the self monitoring app. (Also see this article by Diagnosia co-founder Lukas Zinnagl in TechCrunch)

“Our goal at mySugr is to change how people with diabetes are perceived by the public. Tim understands that every person who lives with diabetes is a hero due to the constant calculations they are making and the data-driven nature requiring them to make decisions without their doctor. We hope people with diabetes will be seen as pioneers of the quantified self movement and Tim is a role-model for making quantified self behavior socially acceptable and perhaps even cool,” states the mySugr website.

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