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, hoping to make a difference in the lives of others. However, the traditional physiotherapy model never quite ignited a passion in her.
She later moved into interventional cardiology but only grew more disillusioned with the physical rehabilitation model. She described it as having a localized, reactive, and volume-based nature. During this time, she began creating content in her spare time, sharing her perspective online about proactive and holistic ways people can eliminate pain. This endeavor took on a life of its own.
She now has over 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, but was simply putting her thoughts on the internet and helping people rethink what care could look like.
Cannon and her work recently attracted the attention of Slow Ventures, which announced a seed investment of 1.1 million dollars. 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 who are making an impact online.
Cannon said she had no plan when she started sharing her thoughts on social media in 2024 and later decided to make it her profession. She said there was no strategy, no roadmap, and certainly no business model behind it. She credits her success to what most content creators do, which is remaining authentic and sharing unfiltered but genuine thoughts.
Expanding a brand on social media is not without challenges. Her social media presence and brand were growing rapidly, which was positive but also presented problems. She was instantly faced with the need to understand business logic, consumer acumen, and content strategy to connect with new audiences. She noted that none of these skills are taught in healthcare, where professionals are trained to help people, not to build brands.
The turning point came when she realized she had become the bottleneck to her own business. She understood she could not keep scaling something that depended solely on her and had to build something that could grow without her. This led her to hire people to help with her projects.
Her strategy also evolved as she moved from just talking about problems in the world of rehabilitation to working on solutions to fix them. Rebuildr is intended to be a complete shift from localized reactive care to a proactive and holistic model. She described it as combining 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 and was not pitching or preparing a presentation deck. However, she connected with an investor at the firm, Megan Lightcap, and told her about what she was building with Rebuildr.
Cannon said the conversation sparked something and that Slow Ventures has helped her imagine a version of Rebuildr that is even bigger than what she originally envisioned. Other personal trainer software in the market includes TrainHeroic, Trainerize, and Everfit. Cannon hopes that her product, Rebuildr, will fundamentally reshape the rehabilitation industry. Her goal is to make high-quality rehabilitation accessible anywhere in the world, not limited by geography, insurance, or thirty-minute appointments.