Our investment in Early: making the invisible detectable
We are at the start of a massive healthcare wave, which will see the emphasis move from sick care to health care.
Today, approximately 70% of NHS budgets is spent on hospital and specialist care. But increasingly there is recognition that this focus on sick care is not working: more than ⅓ of all UK cancer patients are diagnosed in A&E. For some cancers, diagnosis happens even later. 56% of England & Wales pancreatic cancers were diagnosed in A&E.
This is simply too late. The earlier the diagnosis, the better the chances of survival. For lung cancer, if it’s detected at Stage 4, you have a less than 20% chance of living longer than a year. If it’s detected at Stage 1, you have an 80% chance.
Some of the key reasons for not detecting serious illness earlier is that we often don’t know there is something wrong with us, or it’s inconvenient to make an appointment to find out.
This is where Early comes in.
Early is dedicated to early detection of serious illness in your home, non-invasively, combining the world’s best design, science and technology to build accessible and human products that we will want to use in our day to day lives. Giving more control and information to help us manage our health, make decisions and spot problems early. Putting the human being at the centre.
As always, it’s the Founders we are backing and their ability to lead a world class multidisciplinary team across design, science and technology: D-J Collins has spent 20 years working for companies like Google, Meta and others on their storytelling and policy issues. Thomas Heatherwick is one of the world’s most respected designers. Both have built global companies that lead their respective fields.
They’ve already started hiring a brilliant, diverse team and working with phenomenal advisors Professor Mark Emberton (Dean of Medical Sciences, University College, London), Professor Yiannis Ventikos (Dean of Engineering, Monash University) and Professor Danny O’Hare (Professor of Biosensor Technology, Imperial College, London).
And they are based in King’s Cross (which as you probably know by now!) is possibly the best place in the world to start this company – with proximity to world-leading university research, teaching hospitals and tech talent. It really is a melting pot of world class talent across all the company’s core disciplines.
We love that Early’s ambitions mean that it is a very hard company to build, and joining our other hard tech portfolio companies including Oxford Nanopore, Automata, Cosyne Tx and CoMind to name a few.
The Founders are very aware they have multiple hard problems to solve, each of which has known and unknown levels of risk and complexity: the science needs to work, the design and engineering need to deliver joy, the data needs to be presented in a way that empowers the consumer. We’re excited by this because hard problems are really an opportunity to impact the world for the better. And if there’s a team that can do it then it’s this one.
Delighted to also be joined by our friends at Softbank Ventures Asia, Creator Fund and angels including Mehdi Ghissassi.
