"A niche within a niche", that was what a venture capitalist told me in 2018 when I gave the elevator pitch for Floreo in a literal elevator at the very first HLTH health tech conference. I interpreted the off-the-cuff remark as a dismissal that the neurodiverse community was too small to justify real innovative technology solutions, and even if they did, that immersive technologies like virtual reality were unlikely to reach any meaningful scale. Fast forward to 2024 with 32K therapy lessons delivered through Floreo in the past year, and I am happy I was undeterred at that moment.
Today, we as a society have come so far in understanding the important and urgent need to support and enable the neurodiverse in every way possible. Meanwhile, three of the biggest tech companies – Meta, Apple, and Bytedance – are ambitiously building products and ecosystems for competing visions of immersive computing. And this is happening in a moment with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), that rivals the beginning of the Internet and mobile computing. So, far from being a “niche” play in a tiny market, Floreo has grown into a robust technology solution that services a large and growing market.
