The Healthtech Podcast

How did a company go from selling luxury ties 👔 to scaling predictive hospital analytics software? This week, James is joined by Orlando Agrippa, CEO and founder of Draper and Dash, a London-based, Venture Capitalist (VC) backed healthcare AI and machine learning predictive data and analytics company. D&D leverages data from the public sector and private healthcare companies both nationally a...

This week, James is joined by Mohamed Taha, founder and CEO of Mojo Diagnostics. Mohamed has been a medical student, an engineer, an investor and is now an entrepreneur. His journey to entrepreneurship started with a misdiagnosis during his PhD in Lyon, meaning he underwent fertility testing thwart with problems and inaccuracies. This led Mohamed to explore the issue and eventually build a company...

Ever wondered how a technology giant like Philips thinks about healthcare and healthtech? This week, James is joined by Jan Kimpen, Chief Medical Officer at Philips. As the leader for clinical strategy, Jan works in close collaboration with health system customers to deliver health technology solutions that support better health outcomes and experiences at lower-cost. A former hospital CEO and Pro...

This week, James is joined by Dr. Yeshwanth Pulijala, artist, dentist and entrepreneur. He describes himself as a generalist who builds technologies that improve healthcare. During his PhD in VR and AR applications in healthcare, he designed and evaluated one of the first immersive virtual reality training tools for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. After training as a dentist, he gained over five y...

James is joined by Dr. Jud Brewer who holds the position of 4th most watched TED talk in 2016, with 12 million views. Jud is founder of MindSciences Inc developing digital therapeutics in the area of addiction, he is Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University and research affiliate at MIT. He’s a...

James is joined by Jake Leach, Chief Technology Officer at Dexcom. Jake oversees the development of next generation products and his teams are responsible for delivering best in class glucose monitoring technology paired with an exceptional user experience. Jake joined Dexcom in March 2004 to lead development of sensor electronics which were part of the first generation Dexcom system. Jake has ser...

James is joined by Dr. Paul-Peter Tak, Venture Partner at Flagship Pioneering and CEO of Kintai Therapeutics. Over a more than 25-year career in the life sciences, Paul-Peter has created and led multiple companies. From 2011 until 2017, Paul-Peter founded and served as senior vice president and head of the immuno-inflammation therapy area unit at GSK. Under Paul-Peter’s leadership, this unit broug...

Can we one day hack the human brain? That day might be sooner than you think... This week, James is joined by Emil Hewage, Co-Founder and CEO at BIOS. Emil undertook PhD research in computational neuroscience and machine learning at the University of Cambridge and has used this knowledge to pioneer the use of artificial intelligence for interpreting neural data. He began working in startups at age...

James is joined by Gary Hughes, CEO and co-founder of Teckro. Gary founded Teckro with his brother, Nigel Hughes, and CTO Jacek Skrzypiec. Teckro uses machine learning to help get drugs and treatments to market quicker and more transparently by speeding up clinical trials - they're working with the top 10 pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the world and their platform takes pressure off docto...

James is joined by Andrew Barraclough, VP of design and innovation at GlaxoSmithKline. With thirty years’ experience, Andrew Barraclough is a leading voice at the heart of design and innovation in the healthcare and FMCG sectors. Andrew joined GlaxoSmithKline in 2011, having previously worked Design Business Association, Novartis Consumer Health, Reckitt Benckiser and Pure Realisation, which he fo...

James is joined by Zoe Blake, CEO of Xenzone. Zoe is on a mission to provide improved access to clinically excellent mental health services across England and beyond via digitised counselling - powered by humans and backed by AI and analytics. Her rich background in technology and leadership, and the personal tragedy of losing her mother - a mental health nurse - to suicide are what drive her to u...

This week, James is joined by Vincent Grasso, a surgeon, software architect and medical informaticist. He’s currently Global Practice Lead for IPSoft where he designs Cognitive Health Agents and their integration by leveraging the ‘Amelia' virtual agent. Vincent completed his surgical residency at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Manhattan Program and whilst at Yale University on a fellowship pr...

James is joined by  Eric Mayes, serial nanotechnology entrepreneur and CEO of Endomag.  Eric has 20 years of experience in technology. He was named the Royal Society of Chemistry’s ‘Entrepreneur of the Year 2003’ for his founding role in NanoMagnetics. He is also an advisor to the University of Texas at Austin’s ‘Texas Health Catalyst’ and the European Healthtech Translation Advisory Board (Health...

James is joined by Max Parmentier, founder and CEO of Agetech startup, Birdie. Max has previously scooped $15M from investors including Bill Gates to work on start-up Wambo, an Amazon-esque marketplace that pools medicine procurement so developing countries can get cheaper drugs. He’s pitched at the White House, and worked at the UN; he’s done five years at McKinsey and even helped the government...

This week James is joined by Andrew Elder, Deputy Managing Partner at Albion VC. Andrew initially practised as a surgeon for six years, specialising in neurosurgery, before joining the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as a consultant in 2001. Whilst at BCG he specialised in healthcare strategy, gaining experience with many large, global clients across the full spectrum of healthcare including biotech...

James is joined by Tania Boler, the cofounder and CEO of Elvie, a health and lifestyle brand developing smarter technology for women. Elvie takes the best of medical technology and turns it into premium consumer products that women love to use. Together with her co-founder, Alex Asseily (co-founder, Jawbone), she has raised > $50M in investment, most recently their $42M Series B round led by IP...

James is joined by Sina Habibi, founder and CEO of AI dementia-tech startup, Cognetivity. Sina simplifies complex challenges and develops compelling and collaborative ways to solve them and in addition to business executive roles he has experience in research (nano-technology and synthetic biology), product management, and high-tech consultancy (big data and fin-tech). Sina has been an active memb...

James is joined by Mir Imran, an Indian healthtech inventor, entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He has had over 20 medical device companies that he has sold to the likes of Ely Lily, Medtronic and Abbott. His first medical device was a world first - the implantable cardiac defibrillator (ICD), which, after being spun out, was acquired by Boston Scientific for $27bn.  Mir invented the BIS monitor...

It's Mental Health Awareness Week and James is joined by Dr. Tim Rogers, who is a medical doctor, consultant and sport psychiatrist. He regularly consults with elite athletes in the UK across a wide variety of sports, including athletes involved in Olympic and Paralympic competition. Tim is a leading advocate for the promotion of athlete wellbeing and mental health and recently joined mental-healt...

James is joined by Robin Farmanfarmaian - healthtech expert, global speaker and author of Amazon No.1 bestseller The Patient as CEO: How Technology Empowers the Healthcare Consumer. Robin is an angel investor in healthtech, backing companies like Dance Biopharm who are doing clinical trials for an inhaled insulin vaporised from a liquid and unicorn MindMaze VR who have raised >$100M (in part fr...

This week, James is joined by Mark Harmon, who originally studied pharmacology before becoming a buyer for M&S - he was there for 7 years travelling the world. He then worked for Arcadia Group, which includes the likes of Miss Selfridge and TopShop, opening up flagship shops in places like Rio, and because loves sport, he moved to speedo to set up Speedo Beach, which was a business within a bu...

This week, James is joined by Peter Hames, cofounder and CEO of Big Health, a healthtech company that creates digital programmes to help those with mental health conditions. Not wanting to enter into the potentially vicious cycle of taking medications to help him sleep, Peter, a psychologist by background, was inspired and motivated to start the company when he saw the market lacked any evidence-b...

This week, James is joined by Rick Rowan, the patient-founder of Nurokor, a company that creates pain-relieving products that use a technology called microcurrent. Their first product is a device that looks pretty similar to a smartphone, with small electrodes attached that are put onto the skin. It's a Class IIa medical device, FDA approved, CE marked and is selling into 5 different countries, wi...

This week, James is joined by Hamish Grierson, founder and CEO of Thriva, who has raised over £6M to provide a home-blood-testing service to UK consumers (and now some NHS patients). Hamish is a serial entrepreneur and moved into healthtech from fintech and talks about his journey and some of the similarities and differences between the two sectors. Hamish will also be appearing in the Forbes Heal...

This week, James is joined by David Crane, founder and CEO of Smoke Free to talk about how becoming a psychologist led to the creation of the Smoke Free app and gives a lesson to all entrepreneurs in how implementing the theory of behavioural psychology has led to it being downloaded over 4 million times. David is a long-time entrepreneur and has previously founded a development agency, making ove...