AUSTRALIAN TECH START-UP, SOLDIER.LY, WINS THE GLOBAL FINALS OF PITCH @ PALACE 2019

December 12th 2019: HealthTech start-up Soldier.ly was announced as a winner of the Global Finals of Pitch @ Palace 2019 in London, UK.

Soldier.ly, who previously won the Australian round of Pitch @ Palace, pitched to global investors, family funds and potential business partners to further the reach of their game-changing, innovative smartwatch app that is designed to empower individuals to combat stress, and also help organisations identify and manage stress in their workforce.

Pitch @ Palace was founded in 2014 to provide a platform to amplify and accelerate the work of entrepreneurs. It gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to meet the people who can help make their business dreams become a reality.

Chris Rhyss Edwards, the soldier turned entrepreneur developed the idea initially to support veterans dealing with stress, anxiety, depression and PTSD, from which he still suffers, with a desire to help veterans take charge of their own mental health and wellness. Due to the app’s success, he now wants to take the app to a broader user base and tackle the symptoms of these serious conditions in the corporate world.

Soldier.ly partnered with The Project Factory, the digital development arm of global communications agency Way To Blue, as the exclusive tech partner to design and build the watch and phone app. With experience in building world-renowned behavioural change apps, The Project Factory, has built-in features to ensure users in the workplace will benefit from regular interaction with the technology with a greater understanding of workplace stress given to the HR team.

Amanda Thirsk, Director Pitch @ Palace said: “We are so proud to showcase inspiring entrepreneurs from across the Pitch @ Palace markets. This evening gave the opportunity for the entrepreneurs to make transformative connections to accelerate their businesses. Congratulations to all of the winners, including Soldier.ly from Pitch @ Palace Australia who join our growing Ecosystem.”

Kat Robinson, CTO at Soldier.ly and Managing Director of The Project Factory, said: “The latest version of the app allows organisations to monitor anonymised health data of their teams via a dashboard developed for Human Resource departments in the hope of ultimately empowering organisations to provide a safer, less stressful environment for staff. This kind of technology will enable genuine understanding in the workplace to combat stress, of all types and bring data and management of often unspoken issues to the fore.”

Founder and CEO at Soldier.ly Chris Edwards said: “By discreetly collecting anonymised real-time data in the workplace, we hope to support businesses in identifying stress trends and triggers so that they can take immediate action to manage the causes of workplace stress and hopefully reduce the average 3.5 leave days employees are taking per annum due to workplace stress.”

With the overall intent to reduce stress in life and in the workplace, the ID.Stress app is seeing a lot of interest from corporations and investors worldwide. With a large development roll-out planned for 2020, The Project Factory and Soldier.ly are looking forward to scaling the products technology and ML capabilities in the new year.