In 2023, Tayla Cannon moved from Australia to the United States for a job in a city she had never seen before. She described it as having no family and no friends, just a fresh start. As someone who suffers from chronic back pain, she first began working in physiotherapy, thinking it was a way to make a difference in the lives of others. Yet the traditional physiotherapy model never quite lit a spark in her.
She later moved to interventional cardiology but only became more disillusioned with the physical rehabilitation model. She described it as having a localized, reactive, and volume-based nature. Meanwhile, in her spare time, she became a content creator, sharing her perspective online about proactive and holistic ways people can get rid of pain. That endeavor took on a life of its own.
She now has more than 130,000 followers on Instagram, a company called Athletic Rebuild which provides rehabilitation and performance coaching for athletes, and a new platform called Rebuildr. Rebuildr is a HIPAA-compliant mentorship application designed to help rehabilitation professionals run their own businesses online. It is set to launch early next year. She stated that she was not trying to build a business initially. She was just putting her brain on the internet and helping people rethink what care could look like.
Cannon and her work caught the eye of Slow Ventures, which announced it invested one point one million dollars as a seed round. She is one of the first creators to receive a check from Slow Ventures’ sixty million dollar Creator Fund, which seeks to back content creators and influencers making an impact online.
Cannon said she had no plan when she started sharing her thoughts on social media in 2024 and then decided to make it her profession. She said there was no strategy, no roadmap, and certainly no business model behind it. She credits what most content creators do for her success, which is remaining authentic and sharing unfiltered but genuine thoughts.
Expanding a brand on social media is not without challenges, however. Her social media presence, and therefore her brand, was growing fast. This was good but also a problem. She was instantly faced with the need to understand business logic, consumer acumen, and content strategy to connect with new audiences. None of which are taught in healthcare, she continued. She explained that healthcare workers are trained to help people, not to build brands.
The turning point came when she realized she was the bottleneck to her own business. She stated that she could not keep scaling something that depended solely on her. She had to build something that could grow without her. She ended up hiring people to help her with her projects.
She also grew her strategy when she moved from just talking about what is broken in the world of rehab to working on solutions to help fix it. Rebuildr is intended to be a complete shift from localized reactive care to a proactive, holistic mode. Cannon said it combines consumer solutions, clinicians, education, and the software to deliver it all at scale.
She was introduced to the team at Slow Ventures through a friend who invited her to one of the firm’s events in Austin. She had zero intention of raising capital. She was not pitching and was not even preparing a presentation deck. Still, she connected with an investor at Slow, Megan Lightcap, and told her about what she was building with Rebuildr.
Cannon said the conversation sparked something, adding that Slow has helped her imagine a version of Rebuildr that is even bigger than what she originally envisioned. Other personal trainer software on the market includes TrainHeroic, Trainerize, and Everfit. Cannon hopes that her product, Rebuildr, fundamentally reshapes the rehabilitation industry. She wants to make high-quality rehab accessible anywhere in the world, not limited by geography, insurance, or thirty-minute appointments.