Q&A with heARsight co-founder Riley Ellingsen
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While working at an eye bank in New York, Riley Ellingsen realized he was interested in the intersection of science and health care with business and entrepreneurship. Originally from northern Idaho, Ellingsen studied biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology at Washington State University.
He moved to South Bend to enroll in the ESTEEM Master of Science program at the University of Notre Dame. There, he created heARsight along with his roommate at Notre Dame, Danny Fritz, after Fritz’s friend, who is hard of hearing experienced difficulty reading lips during the pandemic.
The company has developed software that connects to smart glasses and provides captions of what is being said within the wearer’s field of vision.
Ellingsen spoke with Inside INdiana Business about his journey from collecting eye tissue to building a viable product and business. This Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What exactly made you decide that regular medical practice wasn’t for you anymore?
A variety of contributing factors. The work I was doing in New York was as close to being a doctor as I could be without actually being a doctor. I worked for an eye bank, recovering human ocular tissue from around the New York City area, evaluating and placing the tissue for transplant or research applications. It was a really interesting job but it also exposed me to a lot of the bureaucratic elements of medicine. And I realized that wasn’t something that I was going to be super happy working with.
What initially drew me to medicine was the potential for impact; the capacity for making a difference and helping others I saw as a tangible way of making an impact on my community. What’s kind of cool about the space that I work in now is that there’s still a big potential for impact. The potential is infinitely scalable globally, versus just the patients that I could have touched. So the same draw I initially had to medicine is there, but I see the potential as even greater now.
When you say bureaucratic aspects of medicine, what exactly do you mean?
There’s a lot of conflicting factors around the different parties involved in health care, between patients, providers, and payers like insurance companies, and that can be pretty frustrating for both patients and providers who are beholden to different policies and limitations that might be in place by the bigger systems and insurance companies. I think that can be detrimental to care and health outcomes. That’s something that would be very hard for me to deal with as a practitioner or provider. The space I work in now, yes, there’s a lot of external factors that can impact my work but there’s a lot more freedom to do things than there is in the traditional health care system.
What’s been the most surprising thing since you switched to entrepreneurship?
It’s fundamentally a whole different skill set. My day to day is so different than it was when I worked for the eye bank. There I was largely following a process that was already established. With entrepreneurship, there’s processes you can follow, but there’s a lot of unknowns. It’s kind of a constant realization that you don’t even know what you don’t know. So at each stage you get to, there’s a whole new set of challenges and opportunities; it’s less of a linear, prescriptive path.
What was the process going from somebody’s lived experience to launching a viable product?
In our case, our product is for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and it starts with really understanding what the main pain points are related to communication and how we can ideate and come up with a solution that’s going to address those and add value to them. So really understanding the landscape of assistive technologies currently available, knowing how they work, how they fall short, what can be improved. It also comes down to finding enough relevant people to talk to, wanting to understand and empathize with their challenges in creating solutions.
How did you go about getting the initial capital for the business?
We entered the McCloskey New Venture competition at Notre Dame when we were still students, made it to the semifinals and won a little bit of cash and in-kind awards that allowed us to do some initial kind of proof-of-concept testing. Then we participated in the Race to Revenue summer accelerator program run by the IDEA Center. The program allowed my co-founder and I to work full time over the summer months. We focused on building our first prototype as well as some customer validation work. It was at this point we started having a lot of conversations with prospective investors looking to understand what they would need to see from us to consider making an investment, and then we worked on checking those boxes.
A lot of that consisted of getting a higher fidelity version of the prototype, a bit more customer validation and building out our waitlist. Once we had those checked off, we started changing the conversation to really pitching heARsight and showcasing the traction that we had at that point. We were able to raise our pre-seed round in about four months, and we closed at a little over 300,000.
My co-founder has a background in software engineering, so he serves as our CTO, and I serve as the CEO, wearing a lot of hats, because it’s a pretty small team. We now have a couple of additional software engineers to help develop our minimum viable product.
What made you decide to stay in South Bend after graduation?
The company is headquartered here, but the rest of our team is remote. I decided to stay here because of the opportunity to work both on heARsight and at enFocus. It’s a nonprofit with a mission to empower talent to build stronger communities. We do that through consulting projects with different companies in the region. But what’s cool about it is the model gives all enFocus fellows 30% of their time to work on research, development and entrepreneurship projects. After we raised our first round, they were flexible enough with me to kind of flip that model. So now I work about 70% of my time on heARsight and 30% of my time on enFocus. It’s been a great stepping stone for me and allowed me to really grow into my role as heARsight has grown.
Have there been any challenges in your entrepreneurship journey so far?
Yeah. Definitely. A lot. Kind of coinciding with the fact that you don’t know what you don’t know, every time you get to a further stage, there’s a whole new set of challenges. For a long time, we had an idea and a vision and some interest from potential customers but we didn’t have a product. Now we have a product, we have to go sell the product, which is a whole new set of challenges.
The original vision for heARsight included hardware and software, now we’ve pivoted to being just a software company. We partnered with a third-party hardware provider. Our software does the subtitles and it’s displayed through our partners’ glasses. That wasn’t necessarily a challenge, but it was a decision we had to make that was kind of a fundamental change in the business and it’s allowed us to get a lot further with the same resources. Definitely a good decision but not one we made lightly.
In terms of getting fired up to do what you do on a daily basis, what’s your number one motivation?
I think it just comes back to our mission with heARsight, which is to enhance communication for people who are deaf and hard of hearing. We see a huge unmet need in communication tools for those individuals. There are around 1,500 people on our waitlist now. They all had to tell us how heARsight might benefit them. So I have 1,500 testimonials and whenever I lack motivation, I read through their responses, and I know I have to do this for these people. That’s a big motivator.
Now that we actually have a product, I get to go do demos and let people try it and when you see people light up and get excited and see how it could change their life, that’s pretty rewarding. So that impact piece is what lets you ride out the tough spots.
How does the product work?
We provide a mobile application on both Android or iOS that functions as basically a transcription app. But if you want to experience the transcription in a heads up display, then you can purchase our partner’s glasses and pair them with our app. The glasses are commercially available right now and retail at $299.95. Our software is accessible on a subscription basis but the price hasn’t been announced yet. Our hope is that it’s relatively affordable compared to other hearing assistive technologies out there.
What are some of your favorite things to do around town?
There’s a lot of cool restaurants, bars and breweries that I like to visit with friends. I’ve gotten into cycling and there’s some really nice paved trails that seem to go on forever. I’m missing the Idaho mountains a little bit, but we still have the river, and Lake Michigan is not too far away. I like to get into nature as much as I can. My girlfriend actually runs a startup called Connect574, which is kind of a social club that hosts events monthly. They also organize rec leagues for different sports. So I play a pickleball league on Monday nights and go to different events which is a cool way to meet new people.
What books/podcasts/resources have had a significant impact on you so far, whether that’s on entrepreneurship or just living?
I’m a fan of Guy Razz’s “How I Built This” podcast. The podcasts I probably listen to most frequently used to be called Snacks by Robinhood. The hosts are now independent and have a new podcast called “TBOY” which stands for The Best One Yet. Books related to raising venture capital and other startup things have been helpful at different stages too.
What would you say if we were speaking to your younger self as it relates to the unexpected twists and turns of life?
The younger version of me was not very good at handling unknowns. I’m still not an expert in that but I’m getting conditioned to be better at it given the nature of what I do. There is so much ambiguity but also things have been working out well. Now I view those unknowns fundamentally as learning opportunities and if I had made that connection or realization earlier in life, it would have saved me some stress when I was younger.
I also wish I had had more exposure to entrepreneurship than I did. Especially in this region, there’s a lot of cool stuff happening to get kids attuned to thinking entrepreneurially from a younger age. Last year, I taught a high school entrepreneurship program called Startup Moxie. This year, I’m a coach. It’s through a program called RISE, Regional Innovation and Startup Education. Younger Riley would have loved that but I didn’t really have those opportunities.
How have you been able to deal with all of the mental hurdles that come with entrepreneurship?
Good question. Turning to mentors, advisors, friends and family has been what’s helped me get through it because it’s hard and it’s taxing. So I am fortunate enough to have a great support system and access to good mentors and advisors and they’ve really helped me get through some of the tougher times.
How have you been able to go about finding mentors and connecting with them?
Yeah, in a variety of ways. Leverage the Notre Dame alumni network pretty heavily. You can send someone a cold LinkedIn DM and it’s pretty likely that they’re going to respond and set up a meeting with you. So we’ve been able to get connected to a lot of relevant technical industry advisors and mentors that way and then also just like networking, within the community and finding there’s a lot of people who have started or operated very successful businesses in this region. They’re generally very accessible and excited to mentor the next generation, so taking advantage of that.