For World Health Day we meet the innovative alumni whose start-ups are driving change across the global healthcare sector
- Name: Kyriakos Eleftheriou
- Job title & start-up: CEO and Founder of Terra API
- Institution: Imperial College Business School
- Degree: MSc Management
- Website: https://tryterra.co/
What inspired you to start Terra API? What health challenge does it tackle?
Prior to my business school days I spent time serving in the special forces. During these years I wanted to better understand how I could perform to the best of my ability, working in such chaotic circumstances. I knew the answer lay in prioritising my health, so I started by investing in health sensors and wearables to allow me to keep track of my performance. And in doing this I noticed a key problem – I was measuring so much health data but all the data waswere siloed, and extremely difficult to share with other apps and doctors.
A few years later I went to Imperial College Business School to continue my studies. I always aspired to launch my own business, and in looking for ideas of where I could create value this problem was always in my mind.
We as individuals have so much health data available to us through healthcare providers and through personal monitoring, but it’s siloed across so many different spaces it becomes hard to keep track of. Making this process easier is what has inspired Terra API.
Terra API makes it easy for health data to be transferred – making it available across AI systems, hospitals, GPs and developers working across the sector to build healthcare solutions.
We’ve been on a journey of growth for the last four years. I spent time at Y Combinator in the USA, and raised funding from General Catalyst, Samsung NEXT, NEXT Ventures and others. This, alongside the base I have created through Imperial has allowed us to establish two offices – one in San Francisco and one in London.
How has your business school experience helped you to design and launch your company?
I always wanted to start a company that could contribute on a global scale. I first studied engineering to understand how things worked, and then I wanted to understand the business side and how to capture value, which led to my management studies.
Imperial had an excellent talent density, that helped shape my thinking, and also had the Imperial Enterprise lab – that always helped with guidance, and even offices – offering help without asking for anything.
Dare I say it’s the only place I found outside of the bay area, that people just help without asking for anything in return.
Terra API now hires graduates from Imperial every year and also invites around 20 students every year to complete internships with us.
When I was studying at Imperial I realised that, being a STEM institution, there were so many smart scientists and engineers within the school whom I’ve managed to learn from as much as my lecturers. Imperial has all the merit and all the great people around it to allow those in the community to build and accomplish great things.
What modules from your business education have been the most useful for working within the healthcare sector, and why?
There were a number of things. From my course it was modules that enabled me to better consider how to think about strategy, how you manage people and navigate organisational growth and change.
There was a professor, I believe his name was Ian McKenzie, teaching strategy, and the most interesting thing was the way he ran his lectures. He required us to come to his lectures prepared – so I had to read all the case notes. Then in class he hosted big debates picking someone to debate with someone else, with him helping to control the flow of conversation so that everyone could learn as a result. It taught me that if you can gain the skills to navigate conversations into reaching conclusions amongst a lot of people, some great ideas will come our as a result that everyone is invested in.
I spent a lot of time in the Enterprise Lab too learning from the experts. After I left Imperial they invited me back to keep using the Lab as I worked out how to launch and grow. I went back and forth gaining advice and leveraging their network to find the best possible people to answer my questions. Beyond modules this was the most valuable resource. What’s great about the Imperial community is that everyone there just wants to help.
Has there been a mentor that has helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?
When running a global business, one faces continued increased challenges, and one needs to always seek more complex answers, from people that have been there.
At different stages of the company, a lot of people helped and adviced, such as Tim Brady from Yahoo and Y Combinator, Jared Friedman from Scribd and YC, Tom Blomfield from Monzo, Mark Gainey from Strava, David Lee from Samsung Next, and many many other folks that it would take me forever to list.
The truth of the matter is that one can always take advice, and seek for the advice from the best that faced similar problems, but then one should decide by themselves – because nobody really has as many data points as you do, when running your business.
Tell us about a challenge have you encountered whilst launching your venture, and how you overcame it.
Creation is a process of; thinking of an ideaan idea, doing the idea, seeing it doesn’t work and then trying to find the path to how to make it work better.
In writing, you never write a perfect piece off the bat. It’s more likely you’ll start writing and then review and refine, you make changes, and refine them again, you may have editors offering advice and redirection along the way. The final product comes gradually.
“If we want the world to progress we should always be thinking; “how do we build for good?”. We can start with small things – how do we help our neighbourhood, our town, our city and then focus on our country, and then, humanity.”
– Kyriakos Eleftheriou
And it’s exactly like that in developing a start-up as well. You have to go through thousands of challenges every day and figure out the best path to the destination you want to reach.
Then, after refining your idea, the challenge lies in how you raise money. It’s a challenge in itself.
Once I had the idea and the money, I thought that was the biggest challenge completed. But then comes the next set; hiring people and convincing the smartest minds to join you as you get off the ground. And then you need to work out how to gain customers. I had to figure out how to actually sell and how do you find the right markets. The challenges never stop.
Now, four years later we are serving about six billion activities a year through our infrastructure. Supporting an infrastructure with millions of users all around the world, for every second, is a massive challenge . The next challenge is how to keep increasing at the pace we are, scaling the infrastructure, and enable AIs and developers to build better solutions
When trying to sort out a problem, I usually search and ask the best five best people in the world about it. I’ve turned this strategy into a podcast, where I invite founders on to share their experiences and advice young entrepreneurs.
Outside of degrees/qualifications, what other skills or support do you think is vital for success as an entrepreneur in this sector?
As an entrepreneur the first skill is you don’t die. You have to be extra resilient and understand that entrepreneurship is a process – one that is extremely difficult and to win, you have to keep going.
The second one is you have to be extremely ambitious. I think there are ais a lot of great things that come from ambition – one is that it is much easier to bring folks along the way on the more ambitious ideas because they make an impact and hold promise.
Third is the ability to work with others. Some start-ups can be based on great ideas, raise a lot of money but fail to get off the ground because they cannot work with others. Start-ups require a humongous amount of work and more than one person doing it. It’s always the best teams that win over individuals.
Looking ahead, what are your aspirations for the future of your business?
There will be more sensors embeddedsensors, embedded in our shoes, shirts, clothes in general, and they will also disappear. More biomarkers will be measured over time.
For example, measuring your heart rate, your sleep, your hormone levels and as a result companies will have so much more data available about people. Allowing for that increase in magnitude of data through Terra API is a very important task for us, as well as ensuring access for everyone.
AI will also tell people how to achieve health goals, avoid diseases, analyse meals and offer improvements. So being the foundation of the data that’s helping to transfer that process is our ultimate task.
What advice would you offer to other aspiring founders?
I think one should realize that there is no nation with a monopoly on smarts and competence. Once you realize that you can understand that it’s not because someone is from a specific country or it’s not because someone had more skills than you that they can build something that is really big. And once you know that, then you can be as ambitious as you’d like.
When designing a start-up, think about progress – how can I progress healthcare, how can I progress energy, how can I progress AI? How can I help in general? If you go backwards to Ancient Greeks they created philosophy, the concept of mathematics and so many things still used by the world today. I think it’s because they had good faith and they wanted to share their intellect to ensure the betterment of others. Good start-ups are built on these same principles.
If we want the world to progress we should always be thinking; “how do we build for good?”. We can start with small things – how do we help our neighbourhood, our town, our city and then focus on our country, and then, humanity.
Interested in this series? Read on…