Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Jim Xiao, CEO of Mason (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I was trying to understand your specific use case that you talked about. Are you saying that your customers who are doing remote patient servicing and providing all of those functionalities are building on top of your hardware?

Jim Xiao: We allow them to just focus on the software. Even if you raise millions of dollars, it’s challenging. We free up the resources. They don’t have to think about building the custom bits and focus on the software bits. That has been a tremendous help. Imagine instead of having to build your application on top of Apple or Samsung’s rules, you get to create your own rules.

Now your developers can unlock features or technologies that they didn’t have access to before. Our smart watch has more sensors on it than the Apple watch. It’s essentially a mini-smartphone on your wrist. It’s got a front-facing camera. It’s got oxygen sensors. It’s got ECG and PPG. It’s also got a temperature meter. When you combine all that, you have a powerful computer the size of a watch. We think about these clinical studies. That same Lego piece can be utilized for clinical studies. How do I help grandma in Florida maintain her diabetes treatment? 

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your deployments are in the healthcare space?

Jim Xiao: It’s definitely on the majority side – 60% plus. We do have customers in government, retail, and hospitality. For instance, pizza chains. We help them do digital ordering much faster and have a lot more control than if they were to rely on Uber Eats or DoorDash. 

Sramana Mitra: Do you have any startups building on your system?

Jim Xiao: We have seed stage startups just getting started. For them, we’re a blessing. You just raise a million dollars’ worth of funding. But then to get hundreds of doctors or a hundred sites is going to cost you. It’s going to cost you half of your investment in terms of hardware spend. It’s pretty risky. You may not even get the money back. There’s a lot of risk in that. We eliminate it and say, “For $15 a month, you can get started with one of our designs.” You’d have over-the-air technology as Tesla does. This will be supported for multiple years because we have that end-to-end control of the supply chain. 

Sramana Mitra: How many startups are building on your platform?

Jim Xiao: Right now, we have dozens. Last quarter, we doubled our customer base.

Sramana Mitra: What is the most interesting use case you’ve seen coming out of the startup world?

Jim Xiao: It’s really exciting to watch some of the folks that are innovating in healthcare. We have folks who are building RPM for epilepsy patients. We have folks for cardiac arrest. We have over a million pacemakers installed all over the country. We have customers who are building these Iron Man vests that keep you alive for 90 plus days while the doctor evaluates. You can go fishing and workout without having to carry this giant box.

The most exciting piece is, a couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with psoriasis. It’s not as bad as some of the other patients, but it’s definitely an area where it woke me up. I never thought that I’d be an end user of our technology.

It turns out that some of the stuff that’s missing on the market is doing a dermatologist telemedicine to share a patch of your skin. If you point your smartphone to it, you can’t really talk to your doctor. You can’t say, “This itches more.” For the patients, they may not be getting the right diagnosis. That’s where it gets exciting for us.

Think of a smart pill dispenser. They all stink. Either they’re way too expensive and over-engineered or it’s just something that you’ll find on Alibaba. Are you going to Amazon for your long-term patient adherence solution? Those are areas where we’re able to innovate and take those Lego pieces and start building for these customized cases.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. What about your company? What is the structure of your company? What kind of funding? What kind of scale are you at?

Jim Xiao: Back in 2019, we hit profitability coming out of our garage. We signed up a handful of healthcare companies. We then raised a $25 million Series A led by some pretty well-known investors in the world. We put together a solid group of investors. You look at AWS and Azure, they had Amazon and Microsoft. We assembled an awesome group of investors to back us in our endeavor to build AWS for the edge. We’ve scaled our team to include the capability to build a hardware company and a software company. We’ve done it pretty lean. 

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Jim Xiao, CEO of Mason
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