If you are thinking about trusting a young company with your medical records, this is the question you should be asking. So let me answer it directly.
Most health tech startups fail. The numbers are not subtle - somewhere around nine in ten do not make it. We are a small, founder-led company in soft launch, and I am not going to pretend we are immune to that.
What I can do is tell you exactly what we have committed to if it ever happens, and what we are building now so that you are never the one left holding the bag.
Your data is yours, today
The first commitment is the one that matters most: your health data does not become hostage to exora’s existence. You can request a complete copy of everything we hold for you at any time, by emailing hello@exora.au. We will respond within 30 days. This is in Section 10 of our Privacy Policy and Section 18 of our Terms of Service - not marketing language, contractual obligation.
Right now, that export is a manual process - we do it by hand because the user base is small enough that we can. Before broader launch, we are building automated bulk export in standard formats: PDFs of your original documents, plus structured clinical data in formats the rest of the health system can read (HL7 FHIR). When that ships, exporting your full record will be a button in Settings, not an email.
If we ever shut down
Our Terms of Service already commit us to at least 90 days advance notice before discontinuing the service. That is not legal boilerplate - it is the time we owe you to get your data out. During that window:
- Your account stays active. You can sign in, view your records, and use the app normally.
- We will give you tools to export everything - documents and structured data.
- We will help individually if you need it. If the company is winding down, the team that knows the system is still around to assist.
- The only exceptions to the 90-day notice are situations we cannot control, such as a legal order or a security incident that forces immediate action. In those cases, we commit to as much notice as is reasonably practicable.
This applies whether exora shuts down because of failure, because of acquisition, or because of any other reason.
What about an acquisition?
This is the harder version of the question. A company that gets acquired does not control what happens next - the new owner does. So the honest answer is that no founder can give you a permanent guarantee against acquisition outcomes by promise alone.
What we can do is structure the company so that the promises survive the people. We are actively exploring formal mission-lock structures - public benefit corporation conversion, perpetual purpose trusts, constitutional clauses requiring supermajority approval to change our core commitments around data ownership and the no-sale rule. These are not marketing - they are legal structures designed to make it harder for a future board or acquirer to change the rules on you.
The five principles on our Mission page are where we are today. The work on putting them in the company’s constitution is what we are doing next. We will write more about that as it firms up.
What you should ask of any health tech company
This is not unique to exora. If you are considering any service that holds your medical records, ask them:
- Can I export everything, in standard formats, without asking permission?
- What is in writing about what happens if you shut down?
- What is in writing about what happens if you are acquired?
- Where does it say my data will not be sold or used for advertising? Is that in a marketing page, or in a contract?
If a company cannot answer those in writing, that is information. We answer them in our Terms and Privacy Policy. We will keep tightening those answers as we grow.
The honest version
I would rather you trust exora for the right reasons than the wrong ones. We are building this to last. We are also building it so that if we do not, you are not trapped.
Those two things are not in tension. They are the same commitment.