testFRWD was founded at the peak of the pandemic in 2020 to help the badly affected businesses in the event, travel, sports, and music industry to re-open safely. testFRWD started with at-home PCR test kits, creating a safe and secure end-to-end testing pipeline for private citizens, laboratories, and those industries. Then, it expanded its product portfolio to include the first AI-driven, certified antigen home-testing system that enables seamless, safe, and highly automated at-home certification of rapid tests.
testFRWD works to help countries and businesses to prevent future lockdowns and grant the players in the most impacted industries the certainty they need to start planning for their revival. To this end, it taps digitalisation and state-of-the-art technologies, bringing together a network of manufacturers, IT companies and industry players.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
Both my business partner and myself were impacted directly by the pandemic. He was running international festivals and working as an agent for international music bands, and I was running a hotel in Italy and a retail business in Austria. All of that took a hit when the virus went global. When the first lockdown was announced, we decided to find a solution for re-opening our own businesses in a safe way. This is where the journey started.
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How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
Last year, we were working to identify new ways to fight the pandemic, with the focus on end-to-end testing systems. We got an all-around understanding of what different industries such as events, airlines, festivals, and many more, needed, and started to collaborate with manufacturers, players in the medical space, and IT companies to quickly find solutions for specific problems.
IdentyMe is one of the answers we managed to deliver, as it makes testing and certification affordable, accessible and easy to use. The push for digitalization accelerated during the pandemic, and healthcare is no exception: There, digitalization drives major innovation, too. Right now, we are integrating more and more new technologies into our ecosystem. It’s a very dynamic time for us, with regulations changing on a daily basis, and a lot of uncertainty on the markets.
But it also opens opportunities to help and have a positive impact on testing—not only for Covid but also others with tests that can be conducted at home.
What can we hope to see from testFRWD in the future?
testFRWD will continue to bring innovative products to the market and help to foster digitization of health services, bringing them to the patient directly. We will also help to slash prices on testing and medical services for the consumers as we create real competition in the field that has thus remained largely untouched by free-market dynamics.
testFRWD is working with partners around the globe to bring new technologies directly to the patients.
