This is the first in a series of Founder Q&A’s where Crowdcube’s co-founders, Darren and Luke, meet fellow founders to talk about entrepreneurship, the challenges of starting and growing a business and the insights behind their success. Today, Luke meets Jorge, the co-founder of HealthUnlocked, a venture-backed social network for health, providing peer to peer support and a range of products to improve health and reduce costs of delivering healthcare.
HealthUnlocked is growing fast and reportedly the third largest website in the UK; what is the driver behind your growth?
Over the last year we doubled both our revenues and the size of our team, whilst further growing and engaging our communities with a constantly improving product. The healthcare industry and our product are fully aligned, and we are preparing to further scale up our business to meet the needs of healthcare, industry and our users.
The key drivers have been:
Commercial:
By investing in a skilled and experienced team that can represent the business and what it can offer, we have acquired over 500,000 members who made 40 million site visits in the last year
We have clear products that we are successfully selling, primarily to healthcare providers and pharmaceuticals, and we are seeing continued growth in all of them.
Partnerships:
We have driven our partnerships forward, creating new ones and building current ones. We have opened up access to the platform within the US, with new partners in some of the largest patient organisations.
Product:
Our product has also improved in the past year, with further developments within the platform and advancements in artificial intelligence improving the user experience. Excitingly we have also been developing our app, which we plan to launch later this year.
What’s your experience of having well-known venture capital backer?
Among our main shareholders, we have senior entrepreneurs and investors, including main partners at prestigious venture capital firms in Europe, as well as very successful entrepreneurs like Silicon Valley based Stanford Professor of Computer Sciences, Nick McKeown (Nicira, Barefoot) and Chris Mathias (Arbor Ventures) in London and India to name a few.
We also have, although not main shareholders, tech and healthcare players that are supportive and important to us and have been crucial for our success. Their financial support, professional experience, networks, and ongoing support has been essential in keeping us focused and delivering.
Within this round we have raised investment from a small group of experienced investors and entrepreneurs, lead by Professor Walter Nimmo CBE (Inveresk) who also joined our Board last month. He brings with him a wealth of experience, including taking UK companies to the US.
Finally, the Board is chaired by Mark Powers. Mark brings valuable support and is representative of our shareholders investments, philosophy and voice. The Board’s commitment and intense work has also been crucial when explaining our position in the market and the positive relationship we have with our shareholders.
What are some of the challenges you have faced growing your business?
Building a company from scratch is challenging. This scale-up phase has its own, and exciting, challenges. The most significant are recruiting at speed, whilst keeping the positive culture that exists, growing revenues, delivering value to our users and expanding to the US and keeping the growth and delivery track record we have in the UK.
These challenges are not a surprise. We have been preparing for this for years so as to not miss any opportunity. We started by building a strong recruitment team to bring in the great talent we need, we built a new commercial team – growing from one to eight – and expanded our business significantly in the US, opening an office and signing agreements and commercial deals with American companies and patient organisations.
Having done this, we can now focus on delivering a scale-up phase. We also have a Board and senior executive team that is preparing and ready for our next phases of growth and expansion, including corporate partnerships and financial architecture.
What’s it like working with the NHS?
The NHS constitutes over 80% of healthcare spending in the UK. We have developed strong and positive partnerships with the NHS due to the relevance of our product. Self care, taking support and management of chronic disease away from clinical services and into the community* is an emerging and urgent market need, that NHS commissioners and providers are increasingly looking to.
We have validation within the NHS as a result of being one of the first cohort of organisations to be recognised and chosen to be part of the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA), which support the faster adoption of products to be systematically delivered through the NHS. This gives us unique access to NHS England support to access the market, with Sir Bruce Keogh, Medical Director of the NHS saying: “[HealthUnlocked] has the potential to prevent unnecessary admissions, taking a load off the NHS and, more importantly, actually keeping somebody safe and feeling good”
Support and acknowledgement of the role we are playing in self care, from key strategic organisations, such as King’s Fund and Health Foundation, has also supported us to develop important partnerships with the NHS
We expect this self market to grow even further in the coming year, opening up further NHS partnerships.
*Self care and prevention are a strategic priority for the NHS (NHS Five Year Forward View, and GP Forward View) and budget exists to increase self care.
Crowdcube has offices in mainland Europe, is expansion overseas something you’re considering or are you planning to focus on the UK market?
Aside from spontaneous user growth in the US, we believe that we have strong USPs versus our rivals in the US (global presence, multilingual platform, more conditions covered, more organic traffic and more partner focussed functionality).
In terms of the US market, with a £3 trillion annual expenditure in healthcare it is by far the largest in the world (86% of that spent in chronically ill patients).
The commercial services we offer is what makes us attractive and contributes to success. Following US expansion we may expand into other european or asian geographies, but this would likely be following an additional investment round.
What role does tech play in your business?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the core of what we are doing and fundamental to our future. By developing our own AI we are giving our users better and more relevant experiences on our platform, alongside opening up additional opportunities commercially.
We have been developing this kind of technology over the past few years to better understand our users and improve the experience they have on the site. Over the next few years we will roll out an intelligent engine to recommend content based on a user’s profile, meaning only posts about the person’s relevant conditions and context would be recommended to the user, and we will map different conditions and their links to treatments, side effects and patient experiences. The potential for AI to build and transform our offering is well established and we will constantly develop our AI to provide our users with the best experience and our customers with the knowledge they require.
What attracted you to raise funds from the crowd and your users alongside existing angel and institutional investment?
HealthUnlocked revolves around its members, improving lives, health outcomes and offering support. These members are firmly at the centre of everything we do; opening up investment in this way has been a natural next step for us. Doing crowdfunding is a unique opportunity to allow our members, visitors, the people who work with us and anyone with an interest the chance to join us and be part of our future.
Our existing investors continue to be very important to us and will complement those joining us as part of crowdfunding. All funding will support high tech advancements for users and further development of products to build on the value we offer to our members and customers in both the private and public sector.
You can invest in HealthUnlocked by visiting the pitch page today.
Investments of this nature carry risks to your capital.
Approved as financial promotion by Crowdcube Capital which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (no. 650205).