Dr. Oliver Harrison shares his journey of raising an oversubscribed €30M Series A round for Koa Health. Watch the full video — free, no account needed.
Dr. Oliver Harrison shares his journey of raising an oversubscribed €30M Series A round for Koa Health. He discusses spinning out from Telefonica and securing funding from top-tier investors to provide personalized mental healthcare.
Having the privilege to live in different parts of the world opens your eyes beyond watching something on TV, on the news or reading in a newspaper that these places have a a different way of life, different culture, a different way of seeing the world. And I think it's hugely enriching for people to spend a bit of time living in a different part of the world. [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we're going to be uh talking with an amazing uh founder. You know we're going to be talking about you know mental health about building scaling financing you name it. I think it's a very um you know important topic that that we're going to be covering. Uh it's something that now is top of mind. You know there's more consciousness around it and and I think that it's it's going to be really exciting to be able to to to dig a little bit deeper you know
into into this segment you know today. So again, brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation. And without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Oliver Harrison. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Alejandra. It's great to be here. So born and raised in in London. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Well, life was great. Uh so yes, born in St. Orbins in Hertfordshire, just north of London, and um lived here until I went off to university. Um uh so one of two brothers um uh uh mom's family from Poland originally during the war though she was born in the UK in 1948 and dad's family London born and bred um had a very happy childhood. Uh my parents were not particularly wealthy but they put all the money they did have into um private education for my brother and for me and really nurtured um our interests in the world. Um my brother is a PhD engineer
and uh I realized quite early on that I wanted to be a doctor uh and ultimately um did well at school, ended up at Cambridge University, studied medicine and neuroscience. Um and there met some fantastic people um who really encouraged my interest in the brain and the mind. Uh and then when I went to medical school at UCL, I decided I really wanted to uh pursue a career in psychiatry and mental health. graduated in the '9s uh and uh worked in total for about six years uh training in psychiatry at Imperial College and public health at Johns Hopkins um but also doing some research in how the brain works using some crazy uh MRI scanners at Queen Square Hospital looking at human consciousness and how we process visual information in particular realized pretty early on that um we were never going to win the battle of supply versus demand uh demand for mental health services. Uh this is around
2000 was increasing significantly and the supply of human mental health professionals was relatively fixed. It takes a lot of time and money to train a mental health professional. So waiting times got longer and longer. Um uh and I became very interested in digital tech. This is the time of the first bubble uh to open up access to mental health services. And then around that time sadly I lost two friends to suicide who are on waiting lists um for NHS treatment for depression. And that really galvanized me to focus my career on this topic of using technology to open up access to mental health services. Decided to join McKenzie where I could learn how to use data and technology to solve client problems. Spent five years in the healthcare practice working on technology and data projects with clients around the world. And then in 2006 following a Mackenzie project um I was approached uh to
join a group essentially setting up a new health care system in the Middle East. Moved the family over to Abu Dhabi and spent seven years as director of public health and there we used data to tackle diabetes, heart disease, cancer, road accidents, infectious disease. Um lots of runs on the board. We meaningfully improved life expectancy um and uh became partners with World Health Organization, pharmaceutical companies, IBM, Optum and so on. Um and with those um runs on the board when I moved back to Europe, I was approached by Telefonica, the big phone company. And before that, I mean it's like all over the world. I I mean, unbelievable. What do you think? What kind of um perspective did it give you to be able to to live all over the place? Well, I think um having the privilege to live in different parts of the world opens your eyes beyond watching something on TV, on the news or
reading in a newspaper that these places have a a different way of life, different culture, a different way of seeing the world. Um and I think it's hugely enriching for people to spend a bit of time living in a different part of the world. Um, I think it adds a lot to your ability to empathize with other cultures around the world. And I guess really now tapping into into the Spanish into the Spanish goodies into the Spanish, you know, one of the largest corporation there, you know, Telefonica. How did you, you know, basically cross paths with Telefonica and and what happened there? Yeah. Yeah. So, Telefonica at the time was setting up a new incubator for innovation and uh they called it alpha and it was deliberately modeled after Google X. So, this was to complement their venture capital investments and their Telefonica EMA day, their R&D which really focused on improving their core
services. So, mobile phones, internet uh connectivity and so on. And this was looking at um what was called moonshots. So projects which are really ambitious and in Telefonica's case at the intersection of three things a massive social challenge worldwide that needed to be solved. Um emerging technology that could help to solve it and something where Telefonica had a unique advantage because of their data access understanding of different markets around the world. And the first topic they wanted to look at was health. And uh with my background and um uh experience um I was approached by a head hunter on their behalf uh to have a conversation about founding a new company um supported by Telefonica um but ultimately to become independent and that's now CoA Health. So then let's talk about basically Coah Health. What what what is CoA Health for the people that are listening you know what
could you tell them in terms of business model and how do you guys make money? Yeah, Sakoa Health is a digital mental health company um that's developing breakthrough technology to solve that gap between demand for mental health services and the supply of mental health services worldwide. Um we do that by looking at three different domains. The first is ways to detect mental health symptoms. Um both to detect new cases when somebody develops depression or anxiety or to look at symptoms as they fluctuate over time. um in what's often quite a chronic condition and to do that just using the smartphone not using a new wearable but just using ubiquitous technology that everyone carries. The second is personalization so algorithms for getting the right care to the right person at the right time. And then the third is scalable approaches to treatment. And that's both for people with everyday
mental health symptoms who are below the threshold for clinical diagnosis and clinical treatment. And then a set of digital technologies for supporting people in clinical treatment for a diagnosed mental disorder. So put all of those together and this is a technology stack that we sell as a software. Um but we also bring our own clinicians through partnerships with um provider organizations in different countries and we offer technology enabled service and the benefits are earlier detection, earlier intervention, less suffering but a lot less cost, better clinical outcomes and using our therapy um we can keep people well who have got early signs of developing a mental disorder. where people do have a mental disorder for seven conditions. Uh we can treat with better outcomes with significantly less clinician time. So much more scalable, much more affordable. So how does it feel to be a
doctor running a business? What what does that look like? It felt very early on in my career that the only way to be a doctor was not sitting in a clinic writing prescriptions. And in fact, there are some um uh limitations to that model. you can only see a certain number of people in a day. But if you can create a new technology, then that can help tens of thousands, millions of people worldwide. Um, and I became very interested in this idea of being a doctor, but being a technology doctor. Uh, so developing technology that could improve health outcomes. I have a huge amount of respect for people that trained in medicine and continue to work in the traditional way. um we will always need people who will operate in clinics and and work in operating theaters and hospitals and and so on. Um but for me that wasn't the right path and uh I wanted to do something that could um help more people
um but also…