The Healthtech Podcast

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...

This week Alex and James are joined by Gian Seehra an investor at Octopus Ventures to talk about transitioning from entrepreneur to venture capital, health tech investments and how both founders and investors should approach setting early valuations. Gian focuses on health investments at Octopus and splits his time on deal origination and assessment of investment opportunities. Prior to joining Oc...

On today's episode Alex and James are joined by Dr Sohaib Imtiaz M.D., MPH, VP of Innovation at Owaves, a company that aims to optimize your circadian rhythm through calendar-tracked lifestyle modification. Sohaib is a board-certified physician in lifestyle medicine from the United Kingdom who ranked among the top 10 students nationally in statistics, business studies, and information technology....

Stephen Bourke is cofounder of the UK medicines-management and digital pharmacy app, Echo. Not wanting to be defined by his own medical condition, Stephen, a lifelong patient, embarked on a journey to build a solution that empowers patients and puts them in control of their medications, improving adherence rates and making life with a chronic condition much easier. Since its creation in 2016, Echo...

James is joined by Will Stoddart, a Medical and Tech CEO, with experience founding, growing and scaling Werlabs, a rapidly expanding healthcare internet business based out of Stockholm, Sweden. Prior to Werlabs, Will was a founder, along with his twin brother, at Haploflow; focusing on helping individuals make decisions based on data from wearables. Will has experience across software engineering,...

James is joined by Alex Gilbert who currently manages large Life Sciences Partnerships at Medopad, one of the UK’s highest-growth digital health companies. Alex is an experienced “Jack of all trades” who has been working within the Digital Health industry alongside healthcare, pharmaceutical and tech organisations. Through his experience at Medopad, he has launched national projects, defined produ...

This week, James is joined by Zoe Peden, an experienced healthtech entrepreneur-turned venture capitalist at Ananda Impact Ventures. They discuss Zoe’s journey as founder of social care startup, MyChoicePad; how being driven by impact led her to VC and what she looks for in companies as an investor. Zoe holds an undergraduate degree from LSE, an MBA from Henley Business School and is a visiting le...

This week James is joined by Charlie Regis the co-founder of Styliff Tech. Styliff is an award winning London & Slovenia based development company who pride themselves on perfecting technology in style. Charlie became European Doubles Champion in Tennis with co-founder Lucas in 2012. He worked at Bastion PR Agency in sports sponsorship and earned his BSc in International Business from Loughbro...

This week James is joined by Eric M. Fish who is the Senior Vice President of Legal Services at the Federation of State Medical Boards and serves as the general counsel for the organization. Eric also assists in the FSMB's federal and state advocacy efforts, analyzing legislation and healthcare trends, and consulting on the development of model policies for state medical boards. His current work i...

Alex and James are joined by Jonathan Knight co-founder of Perfect Ward, an app that makes health and quality inspections easy and effective, across hospitals, care homes and community services. Jonathan has a background in management consultancy, specifically healthcare consulting and founded Perfect Ward to solve key issues he identified with the inspections reporting chain. We talk about the se...

Alex, James and Nathan are joined by Dr Chris Whittle CEO and Founder of Q doctor an online video doctor service providing safe, secure, instant and easy to use video GP consultations from your PC or smartphone. Q doctor supports GP practices directly and has been declared safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) after a full inspection. The team discus...

Alex and James are joined by Dr Umang Patel, partnerships and clinical director at Babylon Healthcare who's mission is to put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth. At Babylon, Umang spends his time making sure that safe, effective and personalised healthcare is available to everyone, everywhere. Umang is also an NHS Paediatrician, he can be found treati...

Callum Bramley Founder and CEO of Respond joins Alex, James and Nathan on the podcast. Callum studied robotics and AI at the University of Reading and founded Respond to help patients with early-stage dementia; helping to identify subtle signs a person may exhibit to help improve detection. The team discuss dementia, computer vision and parallels between health-tech and the fashion industry. www.r...

Alex, James and Nathan are joined by Dr Elina Naydenova and Adam Bacon the founders of Feebris an AI-powered system that democratises access to high quality diagnostic and monitoring services beginning with respiratory disease. Elina is a biomedical engineer and data scientist PhD at Oxford University and has also spent time at the World Health Organisation while Adam comes from a strong product b...