DermR Health wins SXSW Sydney 2024 Pitch, heads to Austin, Texas

A medtech startup that aims to revolutionise the future of skin diagnostics has won this year’s SXSW Sydney Pitch Grand Final, and now heads to Austin, Texas to compete at SXSW 2025.

DermR Health is on a mission to prevent one billion skin biopsies by combining a world-first, non-invasive microneedle patch technology with genomics.

“It’s very lonely as a founder and recognition like this is incredibly validating!” said founder Stefan Mazy, collecting his prize after winning the second annual event.

Solving a big, personal problem

Mazy started the business after witnessing his mum’s painful journey dealing with skin cancers.

“Everyone knows about skin cancer, but until it hits home you don’t know the impact,” he told SmartCompany this morning.

“My mum is Mauritian and she has dark skin. One day she came to me with a pimple on her nose and we dismissed it initially. It went away and came back, then went away again. Knowing that a visit to the doctor typically equates pain, we put off a skin check.”

“Eventually we went to doctor. Unfortunately, my mother required Mohs surgery to cut out all the cancerous skin, which is a full-day procedure. The doctor ended up removing cartilage around her nose because the cancer had spread, and she ended up with sleep apnoea – which she will have for the rest of her life.”

This traumatic experience is what motivated Mazy to found DermR Health.

“At least 40% of skin cancer biopsies are actually benign,” he says.

“There are 600,000 avoidable biopsies each year, costing the health service $400 million.”

“That’s a big choke on the healthcare system”.

When he was 19 Sydney born-and-raised Mazy – who is now 37 – developed a DNA test to help understand how your skin will age, and built Skin DNA.

The success of that company allowed him to bootstrap DermR Health. He has received a couple of government grants, taken advantage of the R&D tax incentive, and received $200,000 from the WA Department of Health to participate in The Pilbara Challenge which was designed to alleviate the 1,300 average day wait time in that part of Western Australia to see a dermatologist.

Lean startup goes to Austin

After beating six other startups in yesterday’s SXSW Sydney Pitch Grand Final, Mazy is on his way to Austin, Texas, to pitch his startup at SXSW 2025.

He hopes this will help propel his lean startup – with only three members of staff, plus 15 consultants – towards clinical trials, and a $5 million seed round to take DermR Health to regulatory submission.

“Approached a number of VCs, the ones that invest in deep tech, some have tried to steer us away to something more profitable…

“Our customer is pathology,” said Mazy, explaining it has been hard as a deep tech startup to range pre-seed funds from VCs. “Pathology firms control the biopsy market, and they understand the value of this.

“We came off a bit of a loss last week, so this win is a massive validation. It was exciting to have people understand that we can revolutionise healthcare, that smart people are really listening to us.”

DermR Health aims to generate rapid revenue by licensing its patches, predicting 80% margins.

The company’s innovative DermrPatch extracts skin cells pain-free, without biopsies, and at a much lower cost, via an innovative patch that collects just a few cells to conduct pre-screenings.

Two highly commended startups: Ovum and WaveX

Ovum
Closing the gender health gap

WaveX
Converting ocean waves to clean, green energy

Other SXSW Sydney Pitch finalists…

Airee
Creates air-filters from sheep wool

Outread
Summaries generated by AI

Space Draft
Collaborative visual comms tool

The Laundry Lady
Nationwide mobile laundry

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