Olympic medallist turned health tech entrepreneur Andrew Steele has raised nearly £5m ahead of the US launch of his latest venture, Stride.
Steele – part of the Team GB 4 x 400m relay squad awarded bronze in Beijing 2008 – co-founded genetic testing firm DNAfit and sold it to David Beckham-backed global giant Prenetics for a reported $10m in 2018.
Stride offers holistic health monitoring encompassing DNA, gut and blood tests as well as consultation and supplements and in its latest £4.6m funding round attracted investment from Innovate UK and Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures, among others.
Steele believes the adoption of wearable tech can make preventative health management as commonplace as the iPhone within a decade.
“It’s very interesting looking back at the wearables market now, which is considered mainstream consumer behavior,” the 42-year-old told City AM. “To wear a biometric sensor, which would tell you your heart rate variability and stress levels and measure your sleep stages, when I was an elite athlete, that was super niche, edge-case stuff.”
He added: “I had a nutritionist, a strength and conditioning coach, a psychologist and a physio, and I had all this data which only made sense because I had a coach who could triage and filter to then tell me what made me run faster. I wanted to do that same thing for people being more optimised about their health – living healthier for longer, basically.
“There’s pretty widespread adoption of a £1,000 device in the iPhone. This can be absolutely the same level. Like having a good smartphone, it’s not super cheap but it’s pretty mass affordable. And I think in the next five to 10 years managing your preventative health with scale should be able to come down [in cost]. So it’s not that dissimilar.”
Stride impact ‘can be bigger than eradicating cancer’
The seed funding will be used to expand Stride’s product range, with a multi-source biological age test in development, and launch its Stride One membership in the US.
Steele, the son of former TV doctor Chris Steele, says the programme has retained 85 per cent of customers during its first 13 months.
The business rationale is that active health monitoring and improvement will continue to grow in popularity and, the 2007 British 400m champion says, have a preventative disease impact “much bigger even than eradicating all cancer”.
“We’re betting that the better job we do on some giving someone super valuable insights and helping them improve every day is a positive feedback loop that will keep them members with us for a very long time,” he said.
How Olympic heartbreak fuelled Steele’s business career
Steele was only awarded his Olympic medal in 2017 after the Russian team were disqualified for doping and believes that missing out on the podium and then being omitted from the British team for London 2012 were the catalysts for his drive to enter business.
“The lack of that medal led to a few chain reactions. It forced me to face the rest of my life four or eight years sooner than I had expected,” he said.
“At that point, I had no higher education and no work experience and certainly no money, and so I had to be open to any opportunity.
“So by chance, I had this change in mindset, and then at some point along the way, they awarded me the medal anyway. So I had the best of both worlds.”
There is a certain irony in the fact that the inadequate testing of 2008 pushed Steele into a career entirely centred around some of the most advanced biological benchmarking.
“You can frame it the other way,” he says. “Better testing actually allowed me to win that medal downstream. So maybe everything comes full circle in that way.”