RigRun is a digital health platform built for people the corporate wellness industry has largely not customised solutions for. Founder Louise Martin started her career in the NHS, spending years working directly with offshore and remote crews on oil rigs and in high-risk sites, where standard wellbeing programmes simply didn't land.
That frontline experience became the foundation for Innovative Health Solutions, her original consultancy, and later for RigRun itself. What began as a paper-based system, then fax, then USB transfers between remote sites, has grown into a full digital platform now serving around 10,000 end users across the energy and shipping industries worldwide.
Support from Techscaler, delivered by CodeBase on behalf of the Scottish Government, helped Louise take that platform further still, opening doors into the Middle East and giving her the network and confidence to expand internationally.
This is a case study on staying close to the problem, building for specific needs, and scaling with intention.
Louise Martin's path to RigRun started long before she wrote a business plan. Working as a public health auditor for NHS Grampian, she spent years on oil rigs, and noticed something the industry kept missing: generic corporate wellness programmes simply didn't work for people living in isolated, high-risk environments.
She left the NHS at 25 to found Innovative Health Solutions, delivering tailored resilience and mental health training on-site. But consultancy has a ceiling. You can only be in so many places at once, so Louise began building RigRun, a way to bring that same specialist support to remote crews at scale.
By the time Louise came across Techscaler, RigRun already had a working app, a loyal customer base, and years of hard-won domain expertise behind it. What she didn't have was an easy way into new markets, particularly the Middle East, a region she couldn't have approached alone with any real confidence.
Techscaler, delivered by CodeBase, offered a way in built on trust rather than cold outreach: introductions to government officials, guidance on cultural context, and a peer group of founders navigating similar expansion. For a health-tech company built on credibility, that mattered more than any generic accelerator pitch.
Techscaler's government delegation to the Middle East was the turning point for RigRun's international ambitions. As a female founder heading into a market she'd never worked in professionally, Louise valued having a group around her rather than going alone. The programme handled the cultural groundwork, from etiquette to introductions with government officials, and gave her a base to return to when she wasn't sure of the right move. That trip led directly to speaking slots at major industry conferences in the region, including the SPE HSE Conference in Abu Dhabi, and opened conversations that continue to shape RigRun's expansion strategy today.
Beyond the trip itself, Techscaler connected Louise with mentors who understood the specifics of what she was building. Andrew McGinley, an experienced Entrepreneur-in-Residence at CodeBase, gave direct advice on share structures, complicated territory for any founder taking on new partners, and introduced her to further contacts in Aberdeen. A second mentor with Middle East expertise arranged meetings with company doctors at major regional energy firms, giving Louise a ground-level understanding of the health challenges facing workers there before she pitched a single client.
Between the mentorship and the market access, Techscaler gave Louise a structured, lower-risk way to test an expansion she'd otherwise have approached with far more uncertainty.
Since working with Techscaler, RigRun has kept building momentum in the Middle East and beyond. Louise returns to the region in September for further conference speaking slots, and RigRun's technology is now being aligned with local data residency and security requirements ahead of wider adoption there.
The company has also achieved B Corp certification, scoring highly on an assessment that looks hard at how a business treats people and planet. RigRun links health milestones for its 10,000 users to environmental action, funding ocean plastic clean-up and tree planting as part of its impact model. Alongside that, RigRun has built flexible employment policies designed around the realities of caregiving, creating roles that flex around school terms, sickness, and changing family circumstances rather than asking people to fit a fixed structure.
Techscaler, delivered by CodeBase, gave Louise a base to return to when she wasn't sure of her next step, and a mentor network that understood the specifics of scaling a safety-critical, people-first product internationally.
Her advice to founders is straightforward: don't be afraid of your first business idea. The deep domain experience it gives you is often exactly what leads to the bigger, more scalable idea that follows.
Follow RigRun on LinkedIn for updates on their international expansion and product developments.
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