Roon raises $15M to replace ‘Dr. Google’ with real doctors sharing videos about illness treatments
Illustration by Anna Semenchenko / Getty Images
TechCrunch
Vikram Bhaskaran was leading creator partnerships at Pinterest when his father started showing early symptoms of ALS, a rare, terminal neurodegenerative disease.
“It turned my world upside down,” Bhaskaran said. He worked during the day and spent his evenings googling the illness and treatment options and in Facebook groups. But Bhaskaran discovered that finding clear, helpful information about his father’s condition was incredibly difficult.
“I was sitting in Silicon Valley surrounded by some of the brightest minds in engineering and design,” he said. “But when it came to health, I felt it was like the dark ages.”
So, during the pandemic, Bhaskaran linked up with his two friends, Rohan Ramakrishna, a neurosurgeon at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Pinterest engineer Arun Ranganathan, to build Roon, an online resource that provides clinically accurate complex medical information created by doctors and people living with a specific disease.
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