Slow Ventures announced a $1.1 million seed investment in Tayla Cannon, a fitness and rehabilitation creator with more than 130,000 Instagram followers who is launching a HIPAA-compliant (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) platform for rehab professionals. The investment marks one of the first deployments from the firm’s $60 million Creator Fund established in February 2025.

Cannon moved from Australia to the United States in 2023 to work in physiotherapy before transitioning to interventional cardiology. She became disillusioned with what she describes as the “localized, reactive, and volume-based nature” of traditional physical rehabilitation models.

In 2024, Cannon began sharing content on social media about proactive and holistic approaches to pain management without an initial business strategy or plan. Her content attracted an audience while she simultaneously built Athletic Rebuild, a company providing rehab and performance coaching for athletes.

“I wasn’t trying to build a business; I was just putting my brain on the internet and helping people rethink what care could look like,” Cannon told TechCrunch.

Rebuildr Platform Set for Early 2026 Launch

Cannon is developing Rebuildr, a HIPAA-compliant mentorship and business management platform designed to help rehabilitation professionals run their practices online. The platform aims to shift the rehab industry from localized reactive care to what Cannon calls a “proactive, holistic model” by combining consumer solutions, clinician resources, education, and delivery software.

The platform competes with existing personal trainer software, including TrainHeroic, Trainerize, and Everfit. Rebuildr is scheduled to launch in early 2026.

Cannon stated that her goal is to “make high-quality rehab accessible anywhere in the world, not limited by geography, insurance, or 30-minute appointments.”

Investment Process and Scaling Challenges

Cannon connected with Slow Ventures through a friend who invited her to a firm event in Austin. She met with Megan Lightcap, a partner at Slow Ventures who heads the Creator Fund, without initially intending to raise capital or preparing a pitch deck.

Cannon identifies herself as the bottleneck to her business growth, stating she “couldn’t keep scaling something that depended solely on me” and subsequently hired team members to support her projects.

She attributes her social media growth to authentic content sharing, noting that healthcare training does not cover business logic, consumer acumen, or content strategy. “We’re trained to help people, not to build brands,” Cannon said.

Creator Fund’s Investment Thesis

The Slow Ventures Creator Fund evaluates creators across four dimensions: creator mindset, community quality, category potential, and business traction. Lightcap emphasizes the fund seeks creators who “think about themselves like a founder and entrepreneur and less like talent.”

“The thing I am hanging my hat and my career on is that there is an entire class of these amazing entrepreneurial creators who are going to be the next wave of the best entrepreneurs in our country and beyond,” Lightcap told Net Influencer in a recent interview.

The fund invests in a creator’s holding company structure rather than individual product lines, maintaining alignment while enabling experimentation across multiple ventures. Lightcap notes this approach differs from backing single products that might be abandoned if a creator shifts focus.

Prior to Cannon’s investment, the fund’s first deal was a $2 million investment in woodworking creator Jonathan Katz-Moses, who applied through the fund’s open application process after Slow Ventures evaluated 700 applicants.