Empowering health: Inside Thriva’s journey to revolutionise personal health monitoring

James Aubrey, Finance Director at Thriva, shares insights into the company's mission to revolutionise personal health monitoring through accessible and detailed blood tests.

Since its founding in 2016 by Hamish Grierson, Tom Livesey, and Eliot Brooks, Thriva has grown at an extraordinary pace, driven by their commitment to empower individuals to take control of their health through smart monitoring.

In this interview, James discusses the evolution of Thriva, the challenges and opportunities faced during the pandemic, and the business’s focus on sustainable growth and strategic innovation in the health tech space.

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James, tell us about Thriva’s mission and the unique problem it set out to solve.

At Thriva, our mission is to give people the tools they need to monitor their health on their own terms. The company started because the founders were frustrated with the limited options available to consumers who wanted to monitor their own health, especially through blood tests.

We saw the NHS as primarily designed to deliver a reactive system – a "sick service" – focused on diagnosing and treating illness rather than supporting long-term health and wellness. This meant that if you were health-conscious and wanted a blood test to check your general health, you'd often face scepticism and receive results that were either “bad” or “okay” with no detailed insight on how to improve your results. The reality is “sick” and “healthy” aren’t binary states but a spectrum, and your blood results can tell you where you currently are on that spectrum.

Thriva set out to fill that gap by offering personalised blood tests that allow customers to ‘listen to their blood’, much like how smartwatches track steps and heart rate. Blood can reveal so much more about your health than just whether something is wrong. It provides a spectrum of information from cholesterol levels to hormone function, which through periodic monitoring can help you understand and optimise your health.

Demand for Thriva’s products took off during the COVID pandemic. What impact did this have on your business model?

When COVID hit, it had a huge impact on Thriva and how we operated. Before the pandemic, our focus was primarily on providing blood tests directly to consumers who were keen to monitor their health more proactively. But when the pandemic came along, there was a surge in demand for COVID testing and monitoring antibodies. Suddenly, remote testing became essential. This shift opened up new opportunities for us, particularly with new B2B partners who needed an expert at-home testing provider.

We grew our revenue by 344% in one year, powered by large-scale COVID testing contracts. We were involved in managing the testing and data for national COVID programmes, which required us to scale our operations massively and quickly.

The pandemic forced us to adapt our business model. We expanded our services to include a B2B arm, Thriva Solutions, alongside our direct-to-consumer offerings, allowing us to support not just individuals but also large organisations like the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) and UKSHA. We also partnered with IQVIQ to support the COVID Infection Survey (“CIS”) run by the Office for National Statistics. This enabled the CIS to pivot to a digital model, saving significant sums of public money as workers were no longer required to visit people’s homes. This period really pushed us to innovate and grow rapidly, and while it was challenging, it also allowed us to build a scalable platform that we continue to use as we shift our focus back to our core mission of preventative healthcare.

What was the biggest challenge you’ve faced in managing business growth?

As a company, one of the biggest challenges was managing Thriva’s rapid expansion during the pandemic. We grew incredibly fast, and this meant we had to scale our operations and infrastructure quickly, often building solutions specifically for our government partners while trying to maintain our focus on the consumer side. The pace of growth required careful resource allocation and strategic focus to avoid overstretching the team or losing sight of our long-term goals.

Beyond the pandemic, balancing our two main channels – direct-to-consumer (D2C) and business-to-business (B2B) – has been a challenge, particularly as we transition out of the COVID phase and refocus on our core mission. Each channel has different sales processes, value propositions, and expertise requirements, so keeping them aligned without creating silos took time to get right.

For example, while expanding the B2B side, we needed to ensure our scalable platform could meet the diverse needs of businesses whilst still being true to our D2C brand heritage. Managing this balance and keeping the team united around our overarching vision has been a fascinating challenge, and it’s been incredibly rewarding to see how far we’ve come.

Post-COVID, what strategies did you put in place to help you achieve sustainable growth?

Our major focus here was to continue enhancing our D2C brand while also expanding our B2B arm. This involved leveraging the scalable platform we developed during the pandemic to partner with high street pharmacies, academic institutions, and explore new opportunities in clinical trials and remote health monitoring.

This shift allowed us to sustain growth while managing expenses effectively. By focusing on long-term value and continuing to build on the platform we developed, we aimed to create a more sustainable and adaptable business model that could thrive beyond the immediate impacts of the pandemic.

Like many businesses, we also had to adapt our remote working policies and ways of working. As our most expensive resource, ensuring we are empowering employees to have a better work-life balance whilst maintaining communication and teamwork has been an investment worth making.

Have you faced any challenges that are unique to the health tech sector and how did you overcome these?

Absolutely. Working in the health tech sector comes with its own set of unique challenges, particularly around regulatory issues and logistical complexities. For instance, dealing with blood tests and health data involves strict regulatory compliance and managing physical elements, which can be quite complex compared to other sectors like B2B software. We take data privacy very seriously and adopt a “beyond the regulations” approach as much as possible as we are well aware we are dealing with people’s intimate health data.

To overcome these challenges, we focused on building a robust and adaptable infrastructure that could handle the regulatory requirements and logistical demands. This meant developing processes to ensure compliance with health regulations and investing in systems that could manage the complexities of physical testing and data management.

Additionally, we worked on establishing reliable partnerships and leveraging our scalable platform to navigate the regulatory landscape and logistical hurdles effectively.

As the finance director of a scaling company, what lessons have you learned and what advice would you give to others in similar roles?

I think one important lesson is understanding how your personal work style fits into the broader dynamics of the leadership team. For instance, if your CEO is inclined to think big and pivot to new opportunities, it's crucial to balance that with a focus on mitigating risks. On the flip side, if someone on your team is very detail-oriented, they need to ensure they're not just focused on the immediate tasks but also considering long-term implications.

Another lesson is the importance of having a reliable financial foundation. Starting with the ability to close your month-end accounts in less than 10 days is crucial for robust planning and accurate financial statements. You also need to find a balance in your financial model – you don’t want a model that’s so complex only you understand it, nor one that’s too simplistic to accommodate various strategies or capital investments. Simplifying your core model while keeping it flexible enough for detailed analysis is vital for finance being able to communicate the company strategy and risks both internally and externally.

And a final one, is to remember why you do what you do. For us, seeing the feedback from users who have benefited from early health interventions really helps bring everything into focus. After all, the reason we work for Thriva is for the opportunity to make a genuine impact on people’s health and well-being.

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