LiveSmart, a London-based employee health platform, raises £700000 - TechCrunch

LiveSmart, a London-based startup that offers a platform to help employees track and improve their health, has raised £700,000 in funding.

Investors include Matt Merrick (formerly the managing director of Virgin Active Health Clubs) and Lawrence Mitchell (formerly global marketing director and global wellness lead at Reed Business Information); the capital will be used to grow LiveSmart’s B2B offering and bridge the gap to a Series A round later this year.

Competing with more traditional offerings from companies like Bupa and Nuffield, LiveSmart combines employee health screening with what founder Alex Heaton describes as health coaching. The idea is to take data gleaned from various tests offered, as well as pulled in from other sources, such as fitness trackers, and use this as the basis to encourage actual behavioral change.

Unlike yearly or one-off screening, the process is ongoing and, says Heaton, more holistic than many existing employee health programs.

“The vast majority of the world’s population make poor lifestyle choices which affect their long-term health,” he says. “We believe that the solution is to provide a better behavior change platform. This starts with an affordable and repeatable measurement platform — a scale for your health. We then provide education, support and goal setting to help people to improve using health coaches delivered over the phone and through our online platform.”

Heaton says LiveSmart typically looks at more than 100 health data points — including offering a convenient blood screening service via a home kit, clinic visit or on-site — and puts an emphasis on health improvement over time.

“Most people that have had a health screen go on to do very little if anything as a result, our coaching program delivers measurable results,” he says.

In addition, LiveSmart offers a custom-built cognitive test that claims to assess memory and processing speed. The startup also packages employee health data in aggregate (anonymously, of course) so that employers can get an overall sense of the health of their workforce and make company-wide changes, if needed.

“We use data to help our customers to better understand where they are versus other people like them and what their health trajectory is like over time. Data will increasingly be important to us as we grow,” adds Heaton.

“Ultimately, technology is critical to our success, it’s how we are bringing together a complex set of providers and how ultimately we will reduce costs enabling us to improve our margins and/or launch cheaper products, as well as providing better insights to our customers.”