“8 Questions with Playfair” ft. Muhunthan Thillai @ Qureight
This is the twenty-first in our “8 Questions” series — in which we sit down with founders in the Playfair portfolio who share their entrepreneurial journey.
We first invested in Qureight in early 2022. Since then, the company has worked with a who’s who of global biopharma companies, hospitals and contract research organisations, all of whom generate significant value from Qureight's unique, full stack platform that enables collaborative analysis for imaging, clinical data and biomarkers.
Today, we sit down with co-founder and CEO, Muhunthan Thillai, to hear his story from the beginnings of Qureight. We hope this can help other founders and aspirational entrepreneurs in their own ventures.
- What inspired you to be an entrepreneur?
I was born in Sri Lanka and come from a classic immigrant background. My parents are both doctors and came to the UK in the 1980s when there was a period of civil unrest in their home. They did very well for themselves financially and made a great life for myself and my sister. I grew up in Jersey in the Channel Islands and I loved my childhood but I was always aware that because of my family migration I was slightly different to my friends who were almost all local born on the island. For some reason these experiences really made me think about how I could make the world I lived in a better place by doing slightly crazy things.
For my first entry into entrepreneurship I bought boxes of refreshers from local sweet shop once a week and sold them at break time, obviously without a licence or permission from anyone. Word soon got out and
after about a month my remaining stock was confiscated. I had made around £100 (a life changing amount of money for a 12 year old kid) but the headmaster made me give it to charity.
When I was a medical student in London I founded a student magazine called ‘trauma’ with two friends. We produced 700 copies of month and it was entirely paid for by advertising. It was far more exciting than revising for long exams. I sold my stake to a co-founder just before I graduated for exactly £2000 and used it to buy a Tag Heuer Carrera which I still wear most days. As a doctor you are forced to be an entrepreneur every single day because of problems with staffing or resources, particularly in the NHS. I think that is why so many great health tech companies are founded bythose from the medical profession.
2. Can you take us back to the beginnings of Qureight?
The journey began after a long discussion in a Cambridge pub called the Pickerill Inn which sits on the River Cam. I was chatting with my now co-founder Alessandro who is a imaging doctor. We were discussing one of my own patients with a complex lung disease who had been given a blockbuster drug and yet I was unsure whether the drug was working. Earlier that week I had been looking at CT scans of her lungs and even with that level of data it was hard to tell if the patient was getting better or not. I remember vividly thinking that although it was hard as a doctor, it must be nearly impossible for a pharmaceutical company to make decisions on whether billion dollar drugs were working in clinical trials. For me it was a lightbulb moment: take the data and structure in a way using AI to understand if the trials were working or not.
Although we initially considered starting this as a research project, it soon became very clear that there could be a commercial route to market. We set out building a platform that structured healthcare data from lung and heart diseases by working with real world sources such as hospitals to build the best AI models. These models could then allow drug companies to improve the way they trialled drugs in certain diseases. We were really lucky to have founded the company in Cambridge. It is a unique place in that despite being geographically very small, has a high density of entrepreneurs, venture capital, world class hospitals and very very smart people from the University. We were also fortunate to have been accepted onto the Judge Business School accelerator which taught us the very basics of company building from day one.
3. What is the hardest lesson learned since day 1?
One of the hardest lessons was early on in the company.
We had a new small pharmaceutical partner who promised us a contract to run AI models on their drug data. We took what they said at their word and had a number of meetings under NDA. We delivered a statement of work and things were progressing well but one day after many months of discussion they pulled out completely. They told us that they had chosen to go with a competitor data company which was much larger than us.
I was absolutely stunned because it was clear to both us and the pharmaceutical company that the competitor they had chosen had a far inferior product when it came to machine learning image analysis. This was something that they had themselves told us in confidence. To see them choose someone else (for what turned out to be a purely political reason) was a hard pill to swallow.
I learned that day that the number one rule in business is that the deal is never done until the deal is actually done. It really taught me how to sign all of the amazing pharmaceutical partnerships and contracts that we now have.
4. What has been your strangest day as a founder?
I think I’ve had more strange days in the last couple of years in Qureight than the first 40 years of my life.
Having said that one particularly strange day happened last year when we had been trying to get a new contract to run a clinical trial across the line with with a fantastic small biotech company and a really exciting drug. We had been haggling on a price for several weeks and then it turned out that the C level executive responsible for signing off the contract was coincidentally at the same lung disease conference as me in Boston.
I arranged to meet him the next day for breakfast and and given the fact that all meetings had been online, this was the first time I’d met him in person. We had a bagel and a cup of coffee and made small talk until he suddenly asked me to name my figure. I had a series of numbers in my head that I was prepared to do the deal for and I went straight to the highest one. He looked at me for what seemed like an eternity and then he shook my hand and said ‘ok’ and got up and walked straight off which was very unsettling. But within 72 hours we had a signed contract.
The thrill of getting that deal over the line was one of the strangest and most exciting moments in our young company’s history.
5. What have you learned from your investors since you first fundraiser?
Our investors have been really instrumental in teaching me how to grow our company. I have personally learned several lessons including the importance of good structured notes and minutes, the importance of strong financial models and the ability to continue to think outside the box especially when faced with difficult challenges. All of them are seasoned angel investors or come from venture capital and have no doubt seen a number of companies and founders grow and build products over time.
6. As a founder, what is your proudest achievement to date?
Building our team and seeing how exciting it is to bring a diverse set of very talented people together makes me really proud. Some of the people here are far smarter than I am with backgrounds in software engineering, data science and deep neural architecture. It’s really exciting to see them work together on a problem and try and solve it.
However, if I am being honest, our proudest moments always comes from our customers. To give you one specific example, the Swedish biotech Vicore AB used our machine learning image models in their phase 1 AIR study. They were extremely happy with the results going as far as saying that it was pivotal in supporting the mechanism of their drug C21. Along with their own work, our data helped them them raise a significant investment this summer to take that drug forward into a larger phase 2 study which starts next year. Helping companies such as them bring the best drugs to market to eventually help patients with lung and heart diseases will always be my proudest achievements.
7. Crystal Ball: What are your plans for the future?
Our plans are to raise capital from both venture and strategic pharmaceutical relationships such as the really exciting three-year deal we just signed with AstraZeneca to use our technology across a range of different lung disease clinical trials. By doing this we will be able to grow our structured datasets and algorithms and truly become a global company that helps accelerate drug development in lung and heart diseases, particularly those with high unmet needs. It’s a really exciting time at Qureight. As we grow our team and build our product lines I can’t wait to see what the future holds for us.
8. #1 piece of advice to an aspirational founder?
My single most important piece of advice is that as good as it seems it will never be that good and as bad as it seems it will never be that bad.
This may seem counterintuitive but even when you close that investment round or sign that significant commercial deal then remember the old adage from the notorious BIG ‘mo money mo problems’.
On the other hand, even in your worst days where your runway is shortening and your customers are not onboarding then just remember that it may never be as bad as it seems. Take a step back and look at the bigger picture and use that level of detachment to find the way forward.
We are really lucky in this day and age to be living environment where fantastic companies are supported by fantastic investors. It’s always really important in both the best and the worst days to get advice from those who built companies before you and those who are currently on the journey alongside you.
