Madrid, February 2, 2022. Wayra, Telefónica's open innovation hub, enters the €2.4 million funding round for Rosita Longevity, the Valencian app created in 2020 to optimize longevity in people over 60.
Rosita is the first longevity coach that plans a health strategy starting at age 60 to reduce the risk of preventable chronic diseases while empowering older adults with technologies they can use independently at home to take control of their next 20 years.
“At Wayra, we see great potential for 2022 in the eHealth sector, both at the B2C (patients) and B2B (hospitals and healthcare industry) levels. Rosita is a good example of an innovative and necessary application that helps our seniors live longer and better thanks to technology,” highlighted Marta Antúnez, director of Wayra Barcelona. The company, which had already secured a €430,000 funding round in 2020 to launch its service, will use these new funds to create physiological longevity biomarkers using artificial vision, already under development in collaboration with the Biomechanics Institute of Valencia. It will expand its longevity plan to different behavioral cohorts and launch its service in the United States. The founders of Europe's largest longevity school, located in the Cofrentes Spa (Valencia), launched their longevity app with the aim of helping older people extend their healthy life expectancy by 5 years. The Longevity Plan methodology has been developed over 20 years at the spa, and with Rosita, it's being brought into the home with a combination of lifestyle changes, disease risk reduction, and management of chronic pain such as osteoarthritis, which leads to a sedentary lifestyle. Gerontologists and physiologists agree that the key to an effective strategy is consistency in treatment. Rosita subscribers are already using the service to get more than 280 minutes of physical exercise per week, while the WHO recommends a minimum of 150 minutes. These high adherence results are due to their focus on making activities fun and adapted to individual circumstances. The investment round is led by Ship2B Ventures (a Barcelona-based impact venture capital firm through the BSocial Impact Fund, co-invested by the European Investment Fund and Banco Sabadell), with investment from Wayra, JME, Kfund, Bankinter (through the joint Venture Capital program with the Bankinter Innovation Foundation), Seedlink Ventures, the University of Chicago, Seedcamp, and Cristobal Viedma, co-founder of Lingokids. “People know that in countries like Spain we have a life expectancy of around 85 years, but what they don't know is that life expectancy in good health is only 65 years due to diseases that in many cases are preventable. However, healthcare systems are overwhelmed and their “The response to chronic problems such as osteoarthritis, which affects 70% of the elderly population, is basically pharmacological,” explains Clara Fernández, co-founder, adding that “doctors often prescribe exercise without tools or methodology, leading to a lack of motivation, and people either give up or never even start. The reason for our initial success is that we don't give people homework, but rather fun activities they already want to do, adapted and motivated by our virtual and human trainers.”