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Your back needs a hug. BackHug is a smart machine: its robotic fingers will sense and adapt to your back shape to give you individualised massage. You can book a session near you with your smartphone, as easily as an Uber, from £3. We are raising so everyone can have a BackHug anywhere, every day.
Around 1 billion people globally experience back pain. Manual therapy is expensive and requires users to travel, while existing massage devices use rollers and blocks, with limited benefit to the user. Pacla’s founder is an engineer who retrained as a physio. He developed a machine that replicates his manual massage with robotic fingers. Lie on the device and the robotic fingers will sense and adapt to your back shape to offer individualised treatment.
Pacla delivered 40 units for £58.5k revenue (FY18 net loss £177,470). All surveyed users report pain reduction, with an average improvement score of 72%. One year user engagement rate is 88%. Pacla’s founder's former manual physiotherapy customers who use the device say it’s better than his manual treatment.
BackHug is a smart new self-service device designed for offices, gyms, hotels and other locations where users can book sessions on them with an App – from £3 (like Uber for massages). Pacla also aims to develop technology to measure users' back tension changes, demonstrating BackHug’s benefits and optimising individual treatment with AI.
Having raised £640k in equity funding over two rounds since 2017, Pacla is raising to build 150 BackHugs. Its long term ambition is to install 10 million BackHugs globally, so everybody can afford a massage every day, creating a Serviceable Available Market opportunity of over $30bn.