Subscribe to the newsletter:
Know what goes on inside your body with just one finger-prick – and then do something about it! Thriva won the second battle of the first Get in the Ring London event of the ‘16/’17 edition and we sat down with Hamish Grierson, Co-Founder and CEO.
Hamish describes it as a dashboard for your body. Think about your car. It’s complicated. You cannot see anything other than the steering wheel and some other things, the rest is hidden. You need a dashboard to keep track of everything so you can make decisions based on the given information. Thriva thinks about your body in the same way. Your body needs a dashboard and that’s why there is thriva.
The story
The idea for thriva came from the fact that Elliot (one of the co-founders) has a hereditary condition and needs to take a day off every three months to get his blood tested. Getting your blood tested means trips to the doctor, complicated results and long, long waits. As a consequence, people only reactively manage their health. Thriva is there to change this.
How it works
The thriva kit can be ordered online and you’ll receive a finger-prick home blood testing kit. Once you’ve collected your sample, you send it back to thriva’s partner lab who’ll analyse your blood. The results will be posted on your online dashboard where you’ll see your bespoke report created by one of thriva’s GPs. On top of explaining your results, you will receive tips on what small steps you can take to improve your results.
Success
Thriva is already successful, according to Hamish: “A friend of ours – which is why we knew what the results were – was 23 years old and on the outside he looked really fit. He took our test and learned that he had an extremely high cholesterol level, so that he was facing severe chance of heart failure at the age of 30/35. At the moment he is pro-actively managing this risk because he’s aware if this now and because of the recommendations we could give him.”
Challenges
Thriva is not there yet. Their biggest challenge at the moment is to get the word out, to get people talking about thriva. Hamish tells us: “People like it when they hear it. However people are not sitting in a pub talking about how you can better understand your body. So we need to spark that conversation.”
Thriva also gets compared to Theranos a lot. According to Harmish however, Thriva and Theranos have fundamentally different models. Thriva collects more blood than Theranos is doing and they are not trying to reinvent the laboratory. Thriva tests the sample in a proven laboratory with more withdrawn blood, to guarantee the quality of the result.
Connections
At the moment thriva is both looking for investment for their next seed round and corporate partners. Thriva already partnered with a lot of businesses. Corporates need to show that they care about the health of their people and the options that are on the table are pretty limited. They can buy them an insurance policy, but that’s only for when things get wrong. Thriva is a really efficient and inexpensive way to do so by positively influencing productivity and absenteeism.
Want to know more? Visit www.thriva.co or let us introduce you!