Premoney 47: Plerk & Sero

Welcome to all the new readers! Kicked off the year right with a record readership & engagement of the Premoney newsletter. Guess we’re doing something right, or people are just super amped up about pre-seed & seed stage startups this year.

Check out Swapstack on Product Hunt

We’ve been going through YC’s Start-up School videos again recently, and there are so many powerful nuggets in there. One of the pieces of advices we’ve followed as well as possible at Swapstack is to “always be launching.” No need to build up to a single, big moment launch, rather - it’s very powerful to launch multiple times a year, test, iterate, and launch again.

As such, we just launched a new, simple product on Swapstack called a Tip Jar. This product enables creators to collect small tips & donations from their readers. We’d love your support on Product Hunt for that launch!

This weeks’ companies:

Company: Plerk

Premoney note: Plerk was featured almost exactly a year ago today on Premoney…and I should have invested then. Very excited to feature Miguel and the team again to showcase their incredible progress.

Founder: Miguel Medina

Raise Details: 8M, $2.1 signed and wired, $2M soft commitments. [Updated info!]

Verticals: Fintech

Business Model: B2B2C, SaaS

1-Liner: Fintech and banking solutions for employees, starting with perks and benefits

Description: Plerk is a platform that allows founders and HR leaders to define categories of perks that best reflects the culture of their companies (e.g. health insurance, gym, mental health, work from home, music streaming, etc.); and a card so that employees can spend that money on the service or product of their choice no matter where they are based (e.g. Netflix, Gympass, Platzi, Rappi, Nespresso, etc.). In addition, for being part of Plerk, users have benefits such as free telemedicine consultations, first psychological therapy at no cost, discounts on multiple platforms and more.

So Plerk is a card with benefits to pay for flexible perks worldwide. But, that is just the beginning. Plerk is building fintech and banking solutions for employees starting with Perks and Benefits.

Traction Indicators:

• 25,000+ users

• 250+ paying customers

• $1.7M+ ARR $27M+ TPV

• All in just one year.

Company: Sero Health

Source: ODX1 

Founder: Tyler Beaty

Raise Details: Raising $500k, $185k left in the round.

Verticals: Healthtech

Business Model: SaaS

1-Liner: Telehealth infrastructure for clinical neurotech.

Description: 1 in 5 are diagnosed with a mental health condition. There is a rising demand for effective treatments. Therapists are utilizing clinical neurotech devices for next generation treatments to treat more clients and achieve better outcomes beyond talk therapy and medications.

Current clinical neurotech devices are wired and overly complex, requiring a clinician to operate them in-person. These limitations are stunting the growth of these life-changing mental health treatments such as EMDR therapy, Neurofeedback, TMS, tFUS and more.

Our first devices, Sero Stones, enable EMDR therapy to be done remotely and enable in-between sessions support and treatment tracking. EMDR therapy and is a leading next generation therapy for anxiety, PTSD, and panic attacks used by 35,000 clinicians and 1m+ clients every year, but it has much larger potential.

Traction Indicators:

• Successful pilot test of our patent-pending devices, Sero Stones

• Ten clinics have replaced their legacy devices with Sero Stone devices.

• We are on track to produce 500 retail units by May ‘22

• In the final stage of a $1.5M DoD research grant proposal with Kinsey Institute.

That’s all for this week!

Jake