Olympic medallist and health tech entrepreneur Andrew Steele has secured 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 before selling it to David Beckham-backed global giant Prenetics for a reported $10m in 2018.
Funding and product offering
Stride offers health monitoring including DNA, gut and blood tests alongside consultations and supplements. Its latest £4.6m funding round attracted backing from Innovate UK and Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures, amongst others.
Steele believes the widespread adoption of wearable technology could make preventative health management as ubiquitous 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."
Vision for preventative health
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."
Expansion and retention
The seed funding will be deployed to broaden Stride's product portfolio, with a multi-source biological age test currently under development, and roll out its Stride One membership across the US.
Steele, the son of former television doctor Chris Steele, reports the programme has maintained an 85 per cent customer retention rate throughout its initial 13 months.
The commercial logic rests on the belief that proactive health monitoring and enhancement will continue gaining traction and, according to the 2007 British 400m champion, deliver 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.
Olympic journey and mindset shift
Steele only received his Olympic medal in 2017 following the Russian team's disqualification for doping, and believes that being denied a place on the podium and subsequently excluded from the British squad for London 2012 proved pivotal in driving his entrepreneurial ambitions. "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's a certain irony in the fact that the inadequate testing of 2008 propelled Steele into a career entirely focused on some of the most sophisticated 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."
