Embrayse has a simple goal – to delight aged care residents with a personalised food experience.
With many of the founding teams’ loved ones having either experienced life in an aged care home or will one day, they know how vital good food is for older people’s wellbeing. And with the aged care sector still reliant on paper and memory for residents’ meals, they wanted to create a solution to this problem.
That solution was Embrayse – a simple and intuitive meal management app for aged care homes to help providers and their teams create menus, take orders on the go, prepare and fulfil meals. It’s now easy to manage people’s food and drink preferences, as well as their safety needs, like nutrition enhancement and allergy management.
Embrayse received $97,000 in Advance Queensland Ignite Ideas funding and will use their grant to expand into twenty aged care homes and other sectors, as well as hire more staff to support their growing business.
We caught up with Embrayse Chief Executive Officer Poya Manouchehri to learn more about their innovation and how the grant from Advance Queensland’s Ignite Ideas Fund will help their business grow.
What milestones have you reached?
We have built a MLP (minimum loveable product!), which has been rolled out in two residential aged care homes in Queensland. We are continuing to expand on the capabilities of the product as we look to help more providers and partners.
What achievements are you most proud of to date?
Being able to create a product from an idea in a matter of months and having it in the hands of real users has been extremely rewarding. We are always humbled to hear positive feedback from our partners about how the app is making a difference on the ground. It gives us confidence that we’re on the right track and solving a real problem.
What are your business goals over the next 12-24 months?
We are aiming to roll out the software to another 20 aged care homes and explore opportunities to service other sectors, like retirement villages and home care. We also have a product roadmap, which we are continuing to refine as we get feedback from our partners. Obviously, all this work means we’ll begin to hire new roles in our team.
How will you use your Ignite Ideas funding?
Our primary goal right now is to reach out to as many providers as possible. The Ignite Ideas Fund is timely and invaluable to enable us to invest in sales and marketing, including direct outreach and account-based marketing, online marketing and exhibitions.
How will this funding assist your business to grow and/or create jobs?
Beyond the use of the funds for sales and marketing activities and engaging relevant local vendors, the funding will assist us in some of our initial hires in sales and customer success roles, especially as we onboard more and more providers in regional and remote areas.
Would you recommend applying for Advance Queensland programs, such as the Ignite Ideas Fund?
It goes without saying that having access to capital without giving up equity is irreplaceable, and it also provides some structure and added accountability around finances and execution, which is very healthy for an early-stage startup.
Why is it so important to support Queensland businesses, innovators and entrepreneurs?
Australia has some incredible people with world class skills and creativity, but practical and financial support is needed to encourage entrepreneurship. By increasing access to local investment from Queensland private and public entities, these entrepreneurs will choose to stay local instead of going overseas.
What’s your advice for other entrepreneurs and businesses starting out on their innovation journey?
We’re at the start of our journey and still learning, but the most important thing we found was co-designing our solution with real customers. We worked with aged care homes to develop mock-ups of our product and then they tested them and gave us feedback straight away. We’re often surprised by how 10 minutes of watching a user perform a task tells us way more about the problems and challenges they face than hours or days of our team talking about it and making assumptions.
