Ready for America

Founders of a million euros or annual revenue benchmarks belong to a select group. Together with Scaleup Vlaanderen, we are looking for those Flemish growth companies in the one million club.

For years, Stephanie Prose had problems with sleep, but nothing seemed to help. She found meditation and breathing exercises very difficult because she had to concentrate very hard on counting the seconds between inhaling and exhaling or following the instructions on the app. “I’ve also noticed that friends are actually more stressed out by solutions that were intended to deal with their stress. Of course that can’t be on purpose,” says Pirose.

During another sleepless night, he came up with the idea of ​​creating a device that intuitively helps people with their breathing exercises. “As the moon fits in your palm, you can instinctively follow the rhythm as it contracts and expands. It’s as if you have an animal in your hands that you need to breathe.

Brose and his brother Michael went to a product developer to build Moonbird, and in 2019 raised capital through family, friends and the incubator imec.istart. “Covid has impacted on many levels. On the one hand, more attention was paid to mental well-being. People are realizing that health is more than exercising or watching your diet, which helps our mission of making people breathe more consciously. But on the other hand, we had stock issues because of the crisis,” says Prose.

Within a year and a half, Moonbird sold over 15,000 units of the device. Pros: “We are already active in Flanders, the Netherlands and Germany, but we are ready to conquer the American market soon. First we will increase our sales internationally, then we want to further develop our patented product. There is still a lot to do to make breathing exercises more accessible.