Stride, a digital-first health optimisation startup, has raised £4.6 million in a seed round to accelerate the development of a diagnostics-driven preventative health membership. The round includes investment from Arāya Ventures, Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures, Better Ventures, Innovate UK, and an a16z Scout Fund investor, alongside a group of notable angel investors. New capital supports plans to build a leading preventative health platform and to launch Stride’s membership internationally outside of the United Kingdom before the end of the year.
Launched in May 2024, Stride offers the UK's first diagnostics-driven preventative health membership. The service combines testing across DNA, blood and gut health with personalised insights and advanced diagnostics. Members use the platform to build a deeper understanding of their individual health data and to make more informed decisions about their health and performance over time.
Stride positions preventative health as an opportunity to change everyday health behaviours at scale earlier in people’s lives. Many diseases that ultimately shorten lives are conditions people already understand how to prevent, manage or treat, so behaviour change could play a significant role in extending healthy lifespan. Rather than waiting for illness to emerge, Stride’s ambition is to make proactive health management a normal part of everyday life, helping people understand their individual risk factors and make changes earlier.
Stride believes that changing everyday health behaviours at scale could also have a significant impact on healthcare systems. Lifestyle-related diseases place a substantial financial burden on the NHS, with many conditions influenced by behaviours and risk factors that can potentially be addressed earlier through prevention. Stride is also expanding into premium wellness and longevity, with partnerships including Triple Bond at The Botree Hotel and LongLane, a new alcohol-free biohacking destination, where Stride testing is used to personalise members’ experiences.
Founder Andrew Steele brings more than a decade of experience at the intersection of elite performance, genetics and health. Steele spent 13 years competing as a 400m and 4x400m relay athlete for Team GB, winning a bronze medal at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. After his sporting career, Steele co-founded personal genetics company DNAfit, which became part of Prenetics in 2018, and helped grow its EMEA business ahead of Prenetics’ NASDAQ listing in 2022 at a valuation of more than $1bn. As part of its growth, Stride secured Innovate UK funding for two projects focused on a multiomic approach to biological age and an AI health copilot that combines multiple health data sources to deliver personalised insights and support.
Preventative health can sometimes sound boring or worthy, when actually it could be one of the most transformative opportunities of our generation. If we can make better health exciting, aspirational and genuinely engaging, and use deeper analysis to give people better insights earlier in life, we have the potential to change everyday behaviours at a scale that could fundamentally reshape how long and how well we live. The scale of the opportunity is huge. If you could somehow eliminate cancer completely, studies suggest that would add only around three years to average lifespan. The much bigger opportunity is preventing multiple diseases in the first place, by changing everyday health behaviours earlier and at scale. For most of my life, I’ve been obsessed with understanding what makes people perform at their best. Elite athletes have long understood the value of testing, tracking and continually adapting. But that approach shouldn’t be reserved for people competing at the highest level. We’re seeing a cultural shift towards prevention, with people taking much more ownership of their health and wanting to understand what is happening inside their bodies. Stride is being built to give millions of people the tools to do exactly that, helping them move from simply being ‘normal’ to becoming their healthiest, highest-performing selves.
Stride sits at the intersection of some of the most important shifts in healthcare: prevention, personalisation and the consumerisation of health. We believe the opportunity to help people understand and act on their health data earlier is enormous and look forward to being on the journey with Andrew and the team.
Healthcare has traditionally been built around treating problems once they appear. We want to help shift that mindset towards prevention and tackle the bigger opportunity: preventing multiple diseases in the first place by changing everyday health behaviours earlier and at scale. Our mission is to become the go-to home for taking a proactive, preventative approach to life - and, ultimately, help reduce the burden of preventable disease on health systems like the NHS.
