Isofirms

Seedbed Star Alumni and People’s choice winner 2021.

What is your innovation, and who does this help?

Our innovation is a plant based ingredient that enables better uptake of the nutrition provided. Especially for the elderly, it is essential to increase their energy uptake and body muscle percentage as this increases movement and offers a higher quality of life.

Isosteviol is a plant based ingredient from the Stevia plant. It is not a sweetener and does not have any similarity with sugar or sugar-substitutes. It’s a physically enhancing food ingredient to be used to increase performance, endurance, recovery and weight loss.

Application can be taken in two small doses a day of approx. 70-100mg. Due to its neutral taste you can easily add it with a yogurt, ice cream or shake – any existing foods – or it can be taken in a simple capsule or combined as a multivitamin as well. It can be applied in both protein powder, pre-workout shots, gels, and other sports nutrition where the scope is to increase performance, endurance, and recovery. Plus in special nutrition or diet nutrition to help improve muscle/fat ratio in your body.

The very small molecule Isosteviol is highly bioavailable and thus goes from the intestine to the bloodstream very easily. Here it facilitates the transport of sugar into the muscle cells, which increases performance by 8% and endurance in both regular exercising people, athletes, obese, and the elderly. It is also able to increase the glycogen resynthesis within the muscle cells by 35% to speed up recovery and increase protein synthesis

This biohack solution increases our physical energy and body strength, particularly helping elderly individuals to perform daily tasks such as shopping, cleaning, and exercising more easily and independently.

For those who are overweight and obese it provides more support to achieve their health goals. We know from our research that having energy is key to making better life choices, which breaks the behavioral patterns that lead to unhealthy decisions.

Hospital patients who can take isosteviol see a faster improvement in their physical health so they can leave the hospital sooner for home care. This significantly reduces the cost to the health care system and prevents patients needing hospital care.

What makes you passionate about your startup?

We have a passion and excitement about increasing the quality of life in all individuals. Being restricted from the joys in life due to physical parameters significantly lowers your quality of life. When we experience low energy and the feeling of not being able to cope, this has a negative impact on our social pleasures.

There are many good activities for elderly and obese/overweight people today in most EU countries, however it still requires energy and empowerment to break these bad habits to get better. We can help to make these changes faster.

Currently, what are your biggest challenges, and how has the Seedbed Incubator programme helped you to overcome these?

Our biggest challenge is how to position our product and brand in the market and make sure we can address the customers sufficiently. Being even more thorough on our market segmentation, and learning how to effectively communicate within our ecosystem has been essential for us.

We discovered we needed to shift from a product information mode to a service and solution mode. Previously we were convinced that our technology was the most interesting point of discussion with clients, but we forgot to relate this to challenges faced by the companies we were approaching.

Why put Isosteviol in your product? To make it even better! This can be a challenging conversation to have, especially if the take off is the technology. Most companies are interested in how their customers benefit, such as using it pre-workout to experience increased performance and endurance and a fast recovery afterwards. 

What were the highlights of the Seedbed Incubator programme?

We benefitted very much from the sessions on pitching/communication and presentation with Dafna. The feedback from our mentor Samuel was clear and straight to the point. Lastly our hub manager Stella was also amazing in introducing us to partners and contacts who could be of assistance to us.