Why the Airbnb Founder invested in this Uruguayan platform

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

A review by the Argentine writer Hernán Casciari on the site of tourist accommodation caught the attention of the creator of the portal. He traveled to Uruguay to meet his protagonist and ended up associating.

The story of how AirBnb Founder Joe Gebbia decided to invest his money in a small Uruguayan platform that connects patients who need dialysis to medical centers around the world begins with a heart attack. The one that happened to the Argentine writer Hernán Casciari in 2015, while he was staying in the house of the Uruguayan entrepreneur Javier Artigas, in Montevideo.

A review by Casciari on the AirBnb hosting platform about his stay - one of the thousands that are uploaded daily - caught the eye and reached the top executives of AirBnb. There he told how Artigas and his wife, his attentive hosts, had helped him to get to the hospital quickly and took care of him in the following days. The story included how they hurried the traffic with a patrol car - what saved his life - and donated blood for his operation.

The platform today brings together 126,000 patients from around the world - most are from the United States and Europe - and has 88 mentors who are responsible for finding the best options for dialysis when they decide to travel

A year later, Artigas received Joe Gebbia, creator of the hosting platform, in his own home, who from his AirBnb offices in San Francisco had decided to travel to Uruguay especially to meet him. Artigas, who at that time had to undergo dialysis three times a week, had started a small venture to connect dialysis patients to medical centers around the world. A solution designed so that patients can travel with the security of having specialized places where they can continue their treatment without major complications.

The project, in which Javier Artigas had invested about USD 1,700, was, according to his words, "grabbed with brooches" (or "tied with wire" in porteño) but still had already received an award from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT). Gebbia did not hesitate and just a few hours later he was investing in Connecticus Medical, the Artigas project.

The platform today brings together 126,000 patients from around the world - most are from the United States and Europe - and has 88 mentors who are responsible for finding the best options for dialysis when they decide to travel. "The number of patients requiring dialysis is 6 million worldwide, so we still have a long way to go," said Artigas from Montevideo. And he remembered that two years ago, they had only 20 patients connected.

"The people who access our platform are generally of a high average purchasing power, traveling with this pathology is very expensive because dialysis abroad can cost from USD 100 in Honduras to USD 1,100 in the United States and three dialysis per week," he said.

Traveling with this pathology is very expensive because dialysis abroad can cost from USD 100 in Honduras to USD 1,100 in the United States.

In recent days, Hernán Casciari has re-told the story of Javier Artigas' endeavors through various media. In addition to more inquiries from people who want to travel, the writer's story brought him the interest of Argentine investment funds that offered to buy his company, a proposal that does not rule out for now, as long as you can continue to maintain the original idea of ​​a community of patients.

Full of proposals and project, for Artigas the memory of the moment when he was forced to offer his house as accommodation through AirBnb was far behind. Then, shortly before the arrival of Casciari, he had resigned his job as senior manager in a company for a better job offer where finally, knowing some difficulties that brought his kidney disease, they stopped hiring him.

With the passage of time and the growth of Connecticus Medical, the Founder of AirBnb did not stop being involved in the project. Every Monday Gebbia talks on the telephone with Artigas to analyze the evolution of the platform and the new projects.

Javier Artigas remembers with great affection the time in which he lived with Gebbia in his house in Montevideo. "After four days we were living as a family, he's a very simple guy, we spent the night of Reyes together and he even put his shoes on our Christmas tree, a tradition he did not know about. We gave him some espadrilles because he liked the that I used," he recalled.

 The platform can be done by anyone, but we realized that our value is in the community that we achieve and in the trust

Why Artigas does not want to miss the original idea of ​​his project? "We mentors take care of the patients, we see how to choose an adequate outdoor center, but also how to remove the fears so that when that part of stress and distress travels is eliminated, someone who passed it can really tell you how it is. what are you going to live," he said. By sending all the information and medical history to the medical centers and making the payments prior to the arrival of the patient, there is less risk.

"The platform can be done by anyone, but we realized that our value lies in the community we achieve and in the trust," he added.

In 2017, Javier Artigas - who was transplanted several years ago and no longer requires dialysis - won a recognition in Israel, the Startup Nation Jerusalem Prize, awarded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That opened doors for him to settle in that country and found two companies.

Now his life is divided between Uruguay and Israel and he has two new projects underway, one of smart cities and the other -MobileCue- of prediction by facial coding, which recognizes emotions in real time and expands the ability to perceive the emotional state of a driver at the wheel.

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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