Thriva’s co-founders Eliot Brooks, Hamish Grierson, and Tom Livesey

Backing Thriva - empowering people to proactively manage their health

Ricardo Schäfer
Target Global VC
Published in
4 min readMay 25, 2020

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The pandemic is fundamentally changing how we all do business. At Target Global, we’ve found it is shaping our criteria for investing: we’re still investing as much as ever — many of the strongest companies were forged in times of uncertainty, after all — but we have started drawing distinctions between pre- and post-COVID phases when analysing new investment opportunities.

Investment criteria such as team, market size and product quality will always be fundamental, of course, but our post-COVID investment discussions often centre around COVID-specific factors such as long-term changes to consumer behavior, a team’s management quality and adaptability to change, and questions about the new economic reality which awaits us. Which markets will bounce back stronger than ever? What entirely new markets will emerge? Which management teams weather downturns by making fast and decisive adjustments?

This is why we’re so excited about Thriva. When we first looked at proactive health company Thriva in early April and spoke to Hamish, Eliot, and Tom, we immediately knew it ticked all the boxes for an investment in a pre-COVID world: with a great team and strong product. But even more promising is how it measures up against our emerging post-COVID criteria with a market that is only going to grow as people adjust to new ways of thinking about their health and healthcare options once the pandemic has subsided.

What is Thriva?

Thriva is a UK consumer subscription business that allows people to proactively monitor their health. Most healthcare provisions are designed to help people once they’re already sick, and the process is often confusing, unpleasant and worrying. Hamish, Elliot, Tom and their team have correctly identified that lots of us want to take a more pro-active approach to our health and well-being, provided it can be made simple and convenient.

To help people keep track of what’s really happening inside their bodies, the company uses finger- prick test kits which let customers take their own blood samples from the comfort of their homes. These samples are then shipped to one of Thriva’s UKAS-accredited partner labs, to test for a range of factors including cholesterol, blood sugar and hormone levels, vitamins and minerals and even stress.

Test results are digitally communicated back to the customer with commentary by an NHS-trained GP and a Health Plan to help people see exactly what steps they can take. These are all kept in a database managed by the customer and accessed via a simple and intuitive dashboard. Even in normal times, this represents a huge improvement over existing processes: no need to make an appointment to have vials of blood drawn, and full access to the test results rather than having them locked away in a filing cabinet at the doctor’s office. But now that the pandemic is here, the value is even more obvious: anything which can be done remotely de-risks the activity and provides valuable peace of mind.

Once the pandemic eases, we predict that people are more than ever going to value this combination of convenience and proactive insight and monitoring of health: giving you the information you need to make more informed health decisions is a powerful tool.

What’s more, Thriva are working with partners (including hospitals and insurers) who want to provide at-home testing and can integrate with Thriva as a platform to do this. This is set to grow rapidly as the move away from in-person testing to at-home testing continues.

Thriva as a post-COVID investment

At Target Global, we fully support Thriva’s mission to put better health in your hands. People want to know what’s going on inside their bodies, and even before COVID-19 there were clear shifts in consumer behavior towards proactive approaches to health, beyond the usual mainstays of nutrition and physical exercise. We’d go so far as to predict that within 10 years health testing as a commodity will be common for a large portion of the population. We expect COVID-19 will normalise the concept and further expedite this trend, particularly with COVID-19 antibody tests (which Thriva has just started offering) increasingly being designed with remote testing in mind.

Thriva had a strong business model before the pandemic. The company has been around since 2016, during which short time it has helped more than 70,000 people in the UK keep track of their health and provided more than 120,000 tests. The pandemic has barely disrupted Thriva at all: all services are currently running as normal, allowing people to quickly access feedback about their health-related data.

Thriva’s underlying market is huge and fast growing: Demand for personalized and preventative wellbeing solutions has ‘crossed the chasm’, with a global market already estimated at over $240bn.

There’s a clear opportunity to become a category leader with a first-mover advantage. While many other businesses offer testing, predominantly as a transactional one-time service, Thriva is a tracking service focused on creating a truly personalized and convenient service that get people on the front foot with their health. By creating long lasting customer loyalty, Thriva is able to help anyone to understand and track and improve their internal health and wellbeing over time.

And Thriva plans to make their service even more customer friendly. Even though the finger prick home tests are a huge improvement over traditional methods, the company is working on adapting new technologies to make the process even less invasive, further reducing the barriers for mass adoption.

The pandemic has rapidly shifted criteria for investing, but the fundamentals are still as important as ever. Thriva has a strong team, a great product, and a huge market which is only going to grow as more and more people appreciate the importance of being proactive about healthcare.

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