Welcome to Global Good’s Impact Interview series. This interview series is designed to tell the stories of the people and companies working to drive impact in society.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role?
I founded the company in late 2019 with two other alumni from our Exec MBA programme at Bayes Business School. Unusually, we actually graduated in early 2007 and went into the corporate world to pay the bills, and only much later met at an alumni networking event in 2019, when the medsii.com / PharmaSentinel idea was born. Prior to that, I started my career as a coder/database analyst at Fidelity Investments in the UK, where I worked for a few years before moving to San Francisco, initially to work as a Technology Consultant for a prestigious tech consulting company called Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP, inventor of Rapid Application Development, which became Agile). I worked with notable clients, including Russell Investments, Charles Schwab, eTrade, and more, for three years, but this was during the heady dot-com boom period. Naturally, I came up with an online gaming idea and, with a couple of CTP colleagues, created a dot-com startup in 2000. Like my current role, I was COO and also contributed to strategy. We won clients such as the BBC, Disney, and Sony, but the dot-com market crashed, and we couldn’t raise further funding, so we returned money to investors and wound the company down.
I returned to the UK, where I led an eGovernment programme in local government. While there, I started my Exec MBA at Cass (now Bayes) Business School in the City of London. I also ran the Cass Entrepreneurs Network with a view to trying another startup, but London is expensive, so to pay the bills and the mortgage, I moved into management consulting with Accenture and CapGemini for a number of years. I then worked in private equity and later at Diageo for several years before starting PharmaSentinel. In my role as COO, I look after all operations: legal (there’s a lot of legal), insurance, operational finance, paying suppliers, staff and contractors, managing our bank accounts, and corporate governance (including HMRC and Companies House filings), as well as other activities such as applying for grants and contributing to strategy, fundraising and product management. We have a very small core team of only five full-time employees, so it is very much an all-hands-on-deck environment, essentially a typical startup.
How did your company come about, and what was the motivation behind it?
The initial B2C idea we launched was to help people with chronic health conditions. Over 46% of the UK population is on prescription drugs for chronic conditions (chronic meaning there is no real cure and the illness worsens over time). Over a billion prescriptions are issued in the UK each year, but only around 17,000 adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are reported annually. Our co-founder (MHRA/EMA) believed we could do a much better job collecting ADR data than the government.
However, it became apparent that we needed to offer something of value in return for this data. I came up with the idea of a Twitter-like feed where people could follow conditions and medicines they had taken or were taking, and report any ADRs they experienced. For example, users could see which drugs had just been approved for menopause or type 2 diabetes, or which drugs they were taking had received a safety alert. With my mother being a type 2 diabetic, I understood and appreciated the value of this information.
After conducting market research, we raised pre-seed funding (SEIS), assembled a strong development team. Critically, both myself and Paolo, the CTO, have over 25 years’ experience managing remote development and testing teams. We designed, built, and launched the platform along with native apps and the web application, https://medsii.com, in late 2020.
Although we had many users and medsii.com won a Webby Award in the Health & Fitness category in 2021, monetisation proved difficult. In 2022/23, a new investor with significant pharmaceutical commercial experience at AstraZeneca, Bayer, and others joined and suggested we pivot to B2B, which we executed quickly. He invested, took over the CEO position, and I became COO.
Later in 2023, we secured our first pharmaceutical customers, all of whom renewed their annual contracts in 2024, including Merck, UCB, and others. All of our current clients and pipeline are in Europe, even though we are a UK-based, EIS-approved company, and we are planning to enter the UK market in 2026. Excitingly, we have also extended our product to serve scientific and medical societies and local and national health units, and we have been invited to join the NVIDIA Inception Program for promising AI startups.
Medsii is an AI-powered digital platform providing a holistic, 360° verified view of regulatory, scientific, clinical, and competitive data for users and their teams. We serve pharmaceutical and biotech companies, scientific and medical societies, and local and national health units in Europe.
Our platform scans multiple times a day a comprehensive list of verified scientific, medical, regulatory, and clinical sources, understanding and classifying their content. Based on each customer’s profile, it extracts, curates, and delivers only relevant articles:
- The content is delivered through an interactive news feed with a convenient and award-winning UI/UX. Titles, pictures, and summary text are AI-generated based on the content of the corresponding article.
- The system automatically classifies content, detecting the medical condition, topic, and content type. Full articles, with links and attribution, are available for reading directly at the source.
- Additional features include push and email notifications to alert users when new content matching their interests is available, along with the ability to share, save, and comment on articles.
- A proprietary AI assistant called “GAIA” allows users to ask questions in natural language and interact with the feed content, extracting insights and reports. GAIA is trained exclusively on vetted and trusted sources. We have also begun producing AI-generated, high-quality, branded PowerPoint decks and Word documents for customers.
In summary, PharmaSentinel’s medsii.com platform is the only product offering a holistic 360° view of verified regulatory, scientific, legal, market access, and competitive data:
- Verified Sources: A comprehensive list of authoritative sources that is constantly checked and expanded.
- Real-Time Updates: Subscribers receive most updates within 24 hours, and never later than 48 hours from publication.
- Multi-Channel Delivery: Works on any device, including mobile (Android and iOS), web, smart devices such as smartwatches, with push and email notifications.
- AI-Powered: AI content curation and classification allows processing large volumes of content quickly and at low cost. GAIA empowers users to interact with and query their content and produce branded decks and documents.
- Customisable: Users can personalise their feed and track selected topics of interest for themselves and their teams.
Can you describe your company’s mission and values?
Our mission is to deliver faster, verified intelligence to our users and their teams. Our values are innovation, speed, integrity, and diversity.
What are some of the most pressing social issues that your company is working to address through its technology?
A very large percentage of the UK, and indeed the global, population has chronic conditions, for which they are either currently taking a variety of medicines or will need to take them in the future. However, the intelligence available to both drug manufacturers and patients is fragmented, frequently delayed, and difficult to interpret. With so much information available and so much misinformation, it can be onerous to identify what is truly important. Our product enables users to quickly detect key, trusted information and data relevant to their area of interest.
How does your company measure the impact of its work in creating positive change?
Multiple interviews with current and prospective customers indicate that they value the trusted nature of our platform, where users can view and share verified news items and even combine them with their own intelligence in a safe and secure environment. This enables users to work more effectively and efficiently, which should lead to the development of better drugs and improved health outcomes for all, especially those who are most disadvantaged.
In your opinion, what impact will technology have in creating a better future?
AI and automation should have a tremendously positive impact and, indeed, a transformational and revolutionary effect on the health sector over time. There are likely to be more effective medicines made faster – more effective in terms of treating the condition and more effective in terms of fewer side effects. This speed will drastically reduce the cost of designing and developing drugs, leading to lower prices for all. AI will also enable effective preventative interventions, helping all people to lead healthier lives, including those most disadvantaged and those with rare diseases. There will, however, be significant concerns over effective control of AI, increasing wealth inequality, and wider societal impacts such as job losses, disappearing career paths, and more.
What advice do you have for other companies looking to use tech for good and positively impact the world?
First of all, NEVER GIVE UP. You will need to be resilient, very resilient and take care of your physical and mental health. Focus on an idea that you care deeply about, because you likely have a unique and personal insight into it. Lastly, think BIG, but start by solving a small problem.
Pharma Sentinel have recently participated in the Global Good Pitch Session at the National HealthTech Series.
