Dr Rachael Grimaldi is an anaesthetist in the NHS who founded Card Medic at the beginning of the pandemic. Rachael noticed that the PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) used to shield all health workers during covid brought massive communication barriers with it. With doctors and nurses gowned-up, masked and covered head to toe, patients struggled to see, hear and understand them. Card Medic is a digital tool developed to close the gap in communication. Its success during the pandemic ensured its...
Aug 07, 2022•30 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast Originally a doctor, Matthew Beatty was always drawn to the world of entrepreneurship, founding his first company in property technology (proptech). He then became an operator in the healthtech world by joining Huma, then called Medopad. Matt was the clinical lead of Huma’s commercial team. Sapien are a digital clinic run via a mobile app which helps patients to prepare for surgery by optimising their physical and mental health. They also provide post-operative support which enables reduced comp...
Jul 31, 2022•24 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast From academia at Imperial College and the Royal College of Art, to bringing back smiles for patients with Parkinson’s disease, Lucy Jung is the founder of Charco Neurotech. Parkinsons’ Disease is the fastest growing neurodenerative disease in the world. Although the idea that vibration makes PD symptoms better has been around since the 19th century, it is only today that technology has caught up with ideas and Charco are building a hardware solution called CUE1 to leverage this idea. The patient...
Jul 23, 2022•27 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast With a background of digital innovation at CNN and ViaPlay in Sweden and social impact startup, Astrid Gyllenkrok Kristensen’s story to healthtech starts from a personal, lived experience. Having had three children, she found that in Sweden, she had access to great healthcare support during her pregnancies. However, once the child was delivered, she was left alone, without support. She realised this wasn’t just a problem for her or her community, rather a global issue. This is where the idea of ...
Jul 16, 2022•28 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast A former radiologist turned investor, Christoph Ruedig discusses his journey to healthtech from medical school and radiology to management consulting, an MBA from Insead and now being Partner at AlbionVC. One of the original doctor-turned-investors, Christoph has been investing for over a decade since the days that healthtech was called healthcare I.T. ! We discuss Albion, a venture capital fund manager with circa £850M in assets under management and their investing thesis. Christoph highlights ...
Jul 09, 2022•28 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast With a deep technical background including a PhD in nanotechnology, Mohamed Taha ended up in the healthtech world after a health issue led him to have a sperm count done. He realised that sperm analysis was non-automated and non-standardised. A true entrepreneur, Mo became obsessed with the idea of making sperm analysis more accurate using AI. He flew to meet the world’s most famous sperm researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and spent a month convincing him to advise Mojo on how to m...
Jul 04, 2022•30 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast With a background in data science and fintech, Cecilia wondered how to take established solutions in fintech and translate them to the under-served healthcare market. wawa is an intelligent fertility assistant app that helps patients navigate the fertility journey. Used by couples who are experiencing infertility, single mothers and same-sex couples undergoing assisted conception, wawa has found a really good product-market fit. They are focused on closing the reproductive data gap and mos...
Jun 25, 2022•30 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Having just raised a EUR4.1M seed round, Jenny Saft, cofounder at Apryl is hoping to transform the way that employers provide fertility and family forming benefits to employees. From a business background of big corporates, an MBA and then fintech, Jenny moved into healthtech due to personal journey with egg freezing. Berlin-based Apryl believes that everyone has a right to create a family and they are building solutions for this based on employee benefits. We discuss the very fragmented Europea...
Jun 18, 2022•28 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast As computational biology rises as a sector, we meet Duleek Ranatunga, founder of Pear Bio. A scientist founder, Duleek has a background in pharmaceuticals, nano-engineering and medical statistics. Having always wanted to start a biotech company, Duleek founded Pear Bio to build solutions in precision oncology. Pear Bio uses computational biology techniques to ensure patients are getting the most effective chemotherapy combination for them, with the least side effects. We discuss what computation...
Jun 13, 2022•31 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast From a PhD in chemistry to big pharma and biotech to startups and now investing, Barbara successfully navigates a portfolio career. Today, she sits on the investment committees of the Cambridge Enterprise seed fund and Life Arc’s seed fund. She is also the entrepreneur in Residence at the Francis Crick Institute in London. She also runs the KQ Labs accelerator, helping data-driven scientist and health founders commercialise their ideas. Two of our portfolio companies, Mendelian and Charco Neurot...
Jun 05, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast A computer scientist fascinated by the genetic code and its application to rare disease, Rudy Benfredj moved into healthtech and cofounded Mendelian. Mendelscan, their core technology helps identify patients at risk of developing a rare disease early. We touch on the patient’s diagnostic odyssey on their way to being diagnosed with a rare disease, the stats around rare diseases and how being diagnosed earlier can help patient lives. Previously siloed into multiple niches, rare diseases are now a...
May 30, 2022•31 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Ultra-marathoner, ice-swimmer and surfer Hélène Guillame founded Wild.AI to help women to train, eat and recover across all stages of their menstrual cycle and through all stages of life. A former quant in a Hedge fund and a data scientist, Hélène is bringing finance, data and AI skills to healthtech. In this podcast, we discuss how women are not represented equally in sports and scientific research. We touch on how women and not small men and how Wild.AI were the first company to spearhead rese...
May 22, 2022•28 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s guest is Mimi Billing, a Swedish healthtech journalist, covering pan-European Healthtech for Sifted, a Financial Times backed media outlet. We discuss the state of European healthtech, how it differs across the Nordics, Germany and the UK and the important role that journalists play in the healthtech ecosystem. We also touch on cultural differences across Europe, how that plays into go to market strategies and what healthtech founders should think about before pitching their startup ...
Apr 14, 2021•32 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s guest is Emil Larsson, a global executive search specialist in the medical imaging space. Emil regularly places talent into many post series A startups and as I’ve got to know him, I’ve always been struck by how much insider knowledge he has of the whole medical imaging space. As global medical imaging AI landscapes develops and startups become scaleups, specialist recruiters are a key part of this bustling ecosystem. CM Medical and other specialist recruiters are moving beyond ‘just...
Mar 31, 2021•35 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s guest is Victoria Engelhardt, Founder of Keleya, an app that supports pregnant women in their journey to being new parents. Keleya is the latest addition to the Crista Galli Ventures portfolio. The Keleya app has so far been downloaded over 200,000 times and Victoria has been the Apple face of Germany 2020, recently being interviewed by Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. Victoria touches on her career from Rocket Internet in Berlin to management consulting at Boston Consulting Group to foun...
Mar 17, 2021•35 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s guest is Dr Ben Evans, Managing Partner at InHealth Ventures. InHealth Ventures is an early stage healthtech fund investing at seed and series A, both in the US and Europe. Ben discusses his career from medicine to venture capital via management consulting at McKinsey, a stint at a startup and being an operations manager in the NHS. He also touches on what makes a successful founding team, go to market strategies in healthcare and the differences in early-stage innovation between the...
Mar 01, 2021•33 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s guest is Stine Mølgaard Sørensen who is cofounder and COO of Radiobotics, an award-winning deep tech radiology AI startup based in Copenhagen in Denmark. As one of the newest companies in the Crista Galli Ventures portfolio, we are excited to have Stine on the show to share all things Radiobotics. Stine discusses her background in global digital transformation and communication, how she exited a previous startup and just how important storytelling is to a startup. She also touc...
Feb 16, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr Neha Tanna is a VC Investment Partner at Social Starts and Joyance Partners. Neha has had a very diverse portfolio career, starting off in medicine as a GP before moving into pharmaceutical medicine and biotech investing and then onto entrepreneurship and VC via an MBA at London Business School. Neha talks about why she joined Social Starts and Joyance Partners and discusses their really interesting investment thesis on health and happiness. She also touches on her experience of Venture Capit...
Feb 04, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Haris Shuaib is the AI Transformation lead at the London AI Centre which is a hub of innovation in healthcare in the UK, recently receiving £16m in funding to scale up AI work in the NHS and being appointed a preferred partner for NVIDIA’s proposed £40m healthcare supercomputer. With a background in theoretical physics, Haris trained as a medical physicist prior to moving into a leadership role in AI in the NHS. Haris discusses the variety of healthcare AI projects the London AI centre are runni...
Jan 19, 2021•35 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Pam Garside is one of the most well-connected people in UK healthcare. A healthcare management consultant with extensive trans-Atlantic experience, Pam manages a wide-ranging portfolio career. She is a fellow at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge and a member of the investment committee of Cambridge Enterprise, the Tech Transfer component of Cambridge University. Pam founded the Cambridge Health Network, a membership group of senior health leaders in the UK. A well-known, s...
Jan 04, 2021•32 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Professor Wieland Sommer is CEO and founder of Smart Reporting. The company is headquartered in Munich, employing over 60 people and has over 10,000 users in 90 countries around the world. Smart Reporting develops AI-based smart reports for radiologists and pathologists. They recently raised a EUR 15M funding round where we at Crista Galli Ventures participated. Wieland was in frontline medicine for many years, most recently as the Head of Oncologic Imaging at the Ludwig-Maximilians University o...
Dec 14, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr Saira Ghafur is lead for Digital Health at Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation and also a practising Consultant Respiratory Physician. She manages a portfolio career spanning policy, academia, frontline medicine alongside being a founder of two startups. Saira discusses her work on healthcare cybersecurity, evidence generation in digital health and the value of healthcare data in the NHS. She provides tips for managing a wide-ranging portfolio career, provides advi...
Nov 30, 2020•31 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast In episode four of The Healthtech VC, Crista Galli Ventures' founder Dr Fiona Pathiraja, is joined by Dr Tom Carrell - the founder and CEO of Cydar Medical. Tom was working as a consultant vascular surgeon in London when he decided to collaborate with Graeme Penney, an imaging scientist at King’s College London to turn traditional surgical visualisation on its head and transform patient outcomes in endovascular surgery. During the podcast, Tom and Fiona discuss the story of Cydar Medical and the...
Nov 16, 2020•32 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast For episode three of The Healthtech VC, Crista Galli Ventures' founder Dr Fiona Pathiraja, is joined by Julie Sufana, Chief Marketing Officer of portfolio company contextflow, a Vienna based healthtech start-up developing deep learning-based tools to improve radiology workflows. Originally from the US, Julie has an enviably diverse range of cross-sector experience, prior to joining contextflow. Fiona and Julie explore why marketing in healthtech is frequently overlooked, the value of storyt...
Nov 02, 2020•34 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast In this week’s episode of The Healthtech VC, Dr. Fiona Pathiraja meets fellow former radiologist Dr Lizzie Barclay, who is now medical director of Aidence, an Amsterdam based start-up creating innovative AI that helps radiologists in the diagnosis of lung cancer. Lizzie started her career in medicine as an NHS radiologist and after working on the frontline for a number of years, she decided her future lay outside the NHS, leading to her role at Aidence. Fiona and Lizzie discuss the role of AI in...
Oct 19, 2020•33 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast In the first episode of The Healthtech VC, Crista Galli Ventures' founder, Dr Fiona Pathiraja, interviews Neil Daly, founder and CEO of Skin Analytics: a research-led, AI dermatology company committed to helping more people survive skin cancer. The Skin Analytics team has developed a clinically validated machine learning tool, DERM AI, that is as effective as a dermatologist and is key to creating AI-powered clinical dermatology pathways. Neil worked extensively in mobile innovation and strategy...
Sep 23, 2020•53 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 
