Romy Antoine has raised funding to promote health and wellness in the workplace.
Born in Haiti, the founder moved to America before he was one year old. He says his mother often cooked healthy meals throughout his upbringing, and he played sports. When he was age 13, his father purchased a weight set, and Antoine began working out in the living room. He was also infatuated with various magazines that discussed health and wellness. This is something he developed into a lifestyle and carried over into high school and college. While pursuing hiring education, he became a personal trainer, studied biology as a major, and minored in exercise science.
“There’s so many myths out there, so I wanted to make sure I had all the right information, and it’s all backed by science,” he told AFROTECH™ in an interview.
One Stop Wellness
For nearly six years, he focused on an online personal training business, working with clients from across the globe on meal plans and workout programs. In 2018, Antoine expanded his vision by launching One Stop Wellness, which targeted the workplace to help employees in the following areas: emotional, physical, environmental, financial, spiritual, intellectual, occupational, and social wellness, its website mentioned. It also extended its effort within the Black community after receiving inquiries from employees seeking more representation in its materials.
Services
One Stop Wellness’ mission is “to provide people with the knowledge and education to understand their health risks so that they can make more informed healthcare decisions for themselves and their families,” Antoine explained. The platform offers wellness classes led by experts as well as AI-powered insights, activity tracking, medical reports, and daily check-ins, per its website. Additionally, its Voice AI will encourage improved habits and can lower healthcare costs. Furthermore, through employee biometric screening and self-assessment data, One Stop Wellness can also help employees detect health risks.
“We had an early employee user of the app that they thought they were perfectly healthy. This was an African American woman in her late 20s, and through one of our assessments, she found out that she had an AFib problem (Atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm), triggering her to actually go get further help from her doctor,” Antoine recalled. “And this was something she was living with for a while, with a rare cholesterol syndrome that if she hadn’t gotten checked, it would have developed into a food problem, leading to a potential stroke. Happy that we’re able to help her catch that early, because, if not for us, she said she probably would have never gotten that checked.”
$300K Raise
One Stop Wellness has also raised $300,000 from 14 North Texas Angel Network members. Antoine noted that this brings the overall funding to $1 million for a round that began raising funding in 2022. The funding comes at an ideal time as the company has closed on its largest client account. This account will now onboard 150,000 users, equating to $3.8 million yearly. The new funding supports hiring customer success people and improving the company infrastructure to support the volume in this group as well as customizations.
Antoine acknowledges the reality of raising capital as a Black founder and the staggered funding given to the company, which he feels slowed down its progression.
“It’s not always getting these big checks. It’s those small checks that add up. And I think that’s why we see $1 million, but by the time we reached that $1 million, most of it was already used before we even got it,” Antoine detailed. “And what was great is that this last $300K actually gave us enough runway that we can really start moving forward, continuing to build the company, and we don’t have to worry about stopping every couple of weeks to try to find new investors, and we can really lock in and focus on our work.”
How Funding Will Support Innovation
One Stop Wellness is also working on an AI-powered food scanner, and the recent round will support its innovation. The technology can capture pictures of food and determine the portion size, find ingredients, and calculate what is being consumed.
“Where we took it a little further for the Black and minority communities is that we not only built it off of the major food databases, like the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] database and a few others, we started talking to different healthcare institutions in other countries… Now we have a diverse set of foods that our model is trained upon. And now we can have Caribbean, African Americans, Latinos, starting to use this service, and it has foods tailored to what they’re already eating,” Antoine said.
