Dr. Oliver Harrison On Raising Over $34 Million To Provide Personalized And Integrated Mental Health Care From Prevention To Treatment

In an era where mental health challenges are on the rise but access to care remains limited, Dr. Oliver Harrison has positioned himself to drive meaningful change. He is a trained psychiatrist turned entrepreneur with an extraordinary journey through technological innovation.

Oliver’s company, Koa Health, has secured funding from top-tier investors like Wellington Partners, MTIP AG, Asabys Partners, Alma Mundi Ventures, and Akilia Partners.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Dr. Oliver Harrison transitioned from psychiatry to entrepreneurship, leveraging digital solutions to address the global gap in mental health services.
• The loss of two friends to suicide deeply motivated his mission to use technology for early detection and intervention in mental health.
• Koa Health combines AI-powered detection, personalized care, and scalable treatment using just smartphones, not wearables.
• Spinning out from Telefonica into an independent, VC-backed company posed significant challenges, especially during the pandemic.
• Koa Health raised an oversubscribed €30M Series A, backed by investors impressed with its strong IP portfolio and clinical focus.
• The company leverages over a decade of AI research to build predictive tools and digital therapeutics that enhance mental health outcomes.
• Oliver’s vision is “mental health for everyone,” aiming to remove barriers like cost, stigma, and access delays globally.

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About Dr. Oliver Harrison:

Dr. Oliver Harrison is the CEO and founder of Kia Health. He trained as a medical doctor at the University of Cambridge and the University College London (UCL). He practiced psychiatry for six years before dedicating his career to digital mental health. Oliver spent five years in McKinsey’s Health Tech practice and the last 15 years designing and building scalable health tech solutions.

Connect with Dr. Oliver Harrison:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• Forbes Technology Council
• Koa Health

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today we’re going to be talking with an amazing founder. We’re going to be talking about mental health, building, scaling, financing—you name it.

Alejandro Cremades: I think it’s a very important topic that we’re going to be covering. It’s something that is now top of mind. There’s more consciousness around it, and I think that it’s going to be really exciting to dig a little bit deeper into this segment today. So again, brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation.

Alejandro Cremades: And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Oliver Harrison. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Thanks, Alejandro. It’s great to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: So, born and raised in London. Give us a walk down memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Well, life was great. Yes, born in St. Albans in Hertfordshire, just north of London, and lived there until I went off to university. One of two brothers. My mum’s family was originally from Poland during the war, though she was born in the UK in 1948, and my dad’s family is London born and bred.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: I had a very happy childhood. My parents were not particularly wealthy, but they put all the money they did have into private education for my brother and me, and really nurtured our interests in the world.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: My brother is a PhD engineer, and I realized quite early on that I wanted to be a doctor. I did well at school and ended up at Cambridge University, where I studied medicine and neuroscience.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: There I met some fantastic people who really encouraged my interest in the brain and the mind. When I went to medical school at UCL, I decided I really wanted to pursue a career in psychiatry and mental health.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: I graduated in the ’90s and worked for about six years, training in psychiatry at Imperial College and in public health at Johns Hopkins, while also doing some research on how the brain works using some crazy MRI scanners at Queen Square Hospital. We were looking at human consciousness and how we process visual information, in particular.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: I realized pretty early on that we were never going to win the battle of supply versus demand. Demand for mental health services around 2000 was increasing significantly, and the supply of human mental health professionals was relatively fixed. It takes a lot of time and money to train a mental health professional.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: So waiting times got longer and longer. I became very interested in digital tech—this was the time of the first dot-com bubble—as a way to open up access to mental health services.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Around that time, sadly, I lost two friends to suicide who were on NHS waiting lists for treatment for depression. That really galvanized me to focus my career on the topic of using technology to open up access to mental health services.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: I decided to join McKinsey, where I could learn how to use data and technology to solve client problems. I spent five years in the healthcare practice, working on technology and data projects with clients around the world.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Then in 2006, following a McKinsey project, I was approached to join a group that was essentially setting up a new healthcare system in the Middle East.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: I moved my family over to Abu Dhabi and spent seven years as Director of Public Health. There, we used data to tackle diabetes, heart disease, cancer, road accidents, infectious diseases—lots of runs on the board. We meaningfully improved life expectancy and became partners with the World Health Organization, pharmaceutical companies, IBM, Optum, and so on.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: With those runs on the board, when I moved back to Europe, I was approached by Telefonica, the big phone company.

Alejandro Cremades: And before that—I mean, it’s like all over the world—unbelievable. What kind of perspective did it give you to be able to live all over the place?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Well, I think having the privilege to live in different parts of the world opens your eyes beyond watching something on TV or reading about it in a newspaper. These places have a different way of life, different culture, and a different way of seeing the world.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: I think it’s hugely enriching for people to spend a bit of time living in a different part of the world. I think it adds a lot to your ability to empathize with other cultures around the world.

Alejandro Cremades: And I guess really now tapping into the Spanish goodies, into one of the largest corporations there—Telefonica. How did you basically cross paths with Telefonica, and what happened there?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Telefonica at the time was setting up a new incubator for innovation. They called it Alpha, and it was deliberately modeled after Google X. This was to complement their venture capital investments and their Telefonica R&D unit, which really focused on improving their core services—mobile phones, internet connectivity, and so on.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: This was looking at what was called “Moonshots”—projects that were really ambitious and, in Telefonica’s case, at the intersection of three things: a massive social challenge worldwide that needed to be solved, emerging technology that could help solve it, and something where Telefonica had a unique advantage because of their data access and understanding of different markets around the world.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: The first topic they wanted to look at was health. With my background and experience, I was approached by a headhunter on their behalf to have a conversation about founding a new company supported by Telefonica—but ultimately to become independent—and that’s now Coa Health.

Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s talk about Coa Health. What is Coa Health? For the people that are listening, what could you tell them in terms of the business model and how you guys make money?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Coa Health is a digital mental health company that’s developing breakthrough technology to solve that gap between the demand for mental health services and the supply of mental health services worldwide.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: We do that by looking at three different domains. The first is ways to detect mental health symptoms—both to detect new cases when somebody develops depression or anxiety, or to look at symptoms as they fluctuate over time in what’s often quite a chronic condition.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: And we do that just using the smartphone—not using a new wearable, but just using ubiquitous technology that everyone carries. The second is personalization—algorithms for getting the right care to the right person at the right time.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: The third is scalable approaches to treatment. That’s both for people with everyday mental health symptoms who are below the threshold for clinical diagnosis and treatment, and then a set of digital technologies for supporting people in clinical treatment for a diagnosed mental disorder.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Put all of those together and this is a technology stack that we sell as software. But we also bring our own clinicians through partnerships with provider organizations in different countries, and we offer technology-enabled service. The benefits are earlier detection, earlier intervention, less suffering, lower cost, better clinical outcomes, and, using our therapy, we can keep people well who’ve got early signs of developing a mental disorder.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Where people do have a mental disorder—for seven conditions—we can treat them with better outcomes using significantly less clinician time. So it’s much more scalable and much more affordable.

Alejandro Cremades: So how does it feel to be a doctor and run a business? What does that look like?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: It felt very early on in my career that the only way to be a doctor was not sitting in a clinic writing prescriptions. In fact, there are some limitations to that model. You can only see a certain number of people in a day. But if you can create a new technology, then that can help tens of thousands or millions of people worldwide. I became very interested in this idea of being a doctor—but being a technology doctor.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: So, developing technology that can improve health outcomes. I have a huge amount of respect for people that trained in medicine and continue to work in the traditional way. We will always need people who operate in clinics, operating theatres, and hospitals.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: But for me, that wasn’t the right path. I wanted to do something that could help more people, and also combine my interest in technology and medicine.

Alejandro Cremades: So mental health—why is mental health so important today? And why is there suddenly so much attention around it, when before there wasn’t?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: You can maybe make out in the background this picture of the brain that my wife got me for Christmas a few years ago. I’ve always been really passionate about the brain and the mind. When I was a kid thinking about a career in medicine, I considered different parts of the body. The heart—really important, right? But it’s basically a muscle that pumps and has four valves to keep the blood flowing.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: The lungs are like air sacs that exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide. Your kidneys are like filters. But the brain—wow. Okay, this is like one kilo of jelly that sits inside your head.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: It’s responsible for your imagination, your emotion, your memory, your creativity—everything we love about people and what makes us really special as a species and as individual citizens.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: We are only just beginning to understand how it works. It is the most complicated organism in the universe.

Alejandro Cremades: Thank you.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Hundreds of billions of cells interacting in chemical, electronic, and, in many ways, metaphysical ways.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: It’s just wondrous. I fell in love with it as a kid and remain in love with it today. What we’ve seen—certainly since the pandemic, which focused minds—but really since the early 2000s, is a very rapid increase in the prevalence of mental disorders, particularly in younger people.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: That has really brought it up the priority list in healthcare systems around the world. Now, we really worry about the impact of mental disorders on labor market participation—people being in employment, avoiding long- or short-term absence from work, being productive at their desk.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: And that data is getting worse. So it’s become a really important priority for families, communities, countries—and really, for the world.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously, as we were talking earlier, Telefonica got involved, and you were part of the incubator that they had. How was that spinout process?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Phenomenally difficult—for a range of reasons. I remember Jose Maria, who set up Alpha and is the president and chairman of the Telefonica Group, used to describe Telefonica working with small companies as an elephant in bed with a mouse.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: The elephant rolls over in the night and squashes the mouse dead. It didn’t mean to—it just did, because it’s such a big company. So we had huge benefits from being part of the Telefonica Group—not only financial support, but also the reputation of a major global company that allowed us to work with the best universities and healthcare systems: Oxford, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, University College London, NHS England, etc.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Also access to data sets—anonymous data from 600 million global mobile phone users on the network.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: So we could use that data to train algorithms and do really special, deep science. When it came time to move on, there was a little bit of pull—we wanted to move—but also a little bit of push. The financial situation at Telefonica was challenging with the impact of the pandemic in 2020.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: We were pushed out into the world maybe a few months too early—certainly before we had a chance to build a commercial team. And there we were, an independent standalone company, venture capital-backed, and looking to build our profit and loss statement and start generating revenues.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: That transition was particularly challenging for Coa because the Telefonica years were really geared around a moonshot—innovation and radical innovation.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: But sometimes business is about doing the basics really well and doing it with discipline, so you don’t spend too much money. Really getting out into the market and engaging with people on what they want to buy and how they want to buy it.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: So it was a big transition.

Alejandro Cremades: So, talking about the capital raise too—because obviously you guys had Telefonica, and that was a component of being able to raise the money—but how was that journey? Like raising the money during the Telefonica years and then post-Telefonica years?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Yeah, so the effort really began midway through 2019. We started putting together pitch materials, thought in detail about the assets we’d built, how we would go to market, how we would monetize them—the TAM, SAM, SOM, all of that sort of thing.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: We knew that the first product we could sell was a prevention product that we called, at the time, Evermind, and it became Coa Foundations. We started pitching to VCs—and boy, there are a lot of VCs out there.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: I think over the next year and a half, we probably spoke to 160 or 170 VC funds. What happened along the way is we had a conversation with the fund Ancora Finance from London.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: We met them at a mental health conference, and they were fascinated by our IP. At the time, we had about 20 patents—we now have 56. They were really interested in a company that had the discipline to protect its intellectual property and to have a good patent portfolio.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: That’s how the conversation started. Ancora Finance decided to lead our round, put a price on it, and led the negotiations with Telefonica. Those were tough negotiations during a really difficult time—during the pandemic. So, all Zoom calls, no face time, which makes it a lot harder when you’re doing business like that.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Through Ancora, we were introduced to Wellington Partners, MTIP, Asabys, Achillea, Mundi Ventures, Creas, and one or two high-net-worth individuals. Together, we managed to raise an oversubscribed 30 million euro Series A capital raise.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: And lo and behold, we were an independent company.

Alejandro Cremades: So then, tell us about the scaling as well. You guys now have about 67 employees or so, and about 500 clients plus. How has the process been? You’ve achieved product-market fit, you’ve validated it—now it’s time to think about scaling.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Yeah, so not without its challenges. As I mentioned—but just to make it explicit—with the Telefonica support, we were in stealth mode. We had no products in the market apart from tests and prototypes.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: We had no salespeople at all, no marketing materials, no website, no public presence. So, starting from day one, we had to learn all of that stuff in a hurry. And we were launching into the world during the pandemic, which is challenging.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: It was difficult to cut through. Plus, the product that we started with—because it was the easiest from a regulation perspective—was a prevention product.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Think about it as a bit similar to Calm and Headspace. These were two brands already very well established in the direct-to-consumer market but had also begun to sell into businesses.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: We decided early on that we wanted to sell into businesses. And frankly, we found it a much more crowded marketplace than we expected. It was harder to cut through and get our messaging across during the pandemic.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: That led to a few years where we were generating a little bit of revenue from Coa Foundations, but also through consultancy relationships with a couple of medical device and pharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: We were really trying to manage the size of the team while working on our clinical products—both in prediction AI and therapeutics—in order to build a clinical solution, which is very different from just Calm or Headspace.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, in your case too, one thing that is really interesting is that you’ve been involved with AI for a while. How does that look now? Everyone is talking about AI—it’s like this perfect wave happening. And this is something that you actually started looking into about 10 years ago.

Alejandro Cremades: How do you see things happening? How do you see Coa benefiting from being able to ride that wave?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Yeah, wow. So, I think there are two things going on here. One is the hype curve that we’ve all seen before with previous technologies. Some of the more outlandish expectations of AI are maybe beyond what we’re going to see, certainly over the next few years.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: That said, the combination of ever more powerful and ubiquitous computing—not least the cloud transformation—

Dr. Oliver Harrison: —which means that through the web, we can get access to very powerful computing—and advances in mathematics, combined with imagination and creativity—have really created transformative technology.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: People don’t really talk very much anymore about the Turing test, where you interact with a computer to see if it’s human or not, based on its responses—because, actually, a readily available ChatGPT can pass the Turing test for most people most of the time.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: We’ve also seen enormous advances in the practical application of AI. For example, protein folding. The fact that we can now design drugs specifically to interact with a particular protein by looking at how a sequence of DNA leads to a sequence of amino acids, which then leads to a specific protein structure.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: That’s a massive transformation. I remember when I was at Cambridge in the ’90s, the drug discovery process started with a million drug candidates and involved trying all of them in the lab—one after another—and seeing which one binds with the receptor.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: We can now do all of that with a fraction of the cost and effort. So, all to say—the era of AI is here. We’ve reached a level of computing power and a mathematical toolkit with a lot of potential.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: At the same time, society is digitized. So, AI has access to a lot of data—about us as citizens, about healthcare, about travel, banking, and finance.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: That combination is really leading to this revolution. And then, add the funding going into AI companies and research around the world, and we truly stand on the edge of a revolution. It’ll be fascinating to see how it plays out.

Alejandro Cremades: So, talking about how it plays out—let’s say you go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world, Oliver, where the vision of Coa Health is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Yes, our vision at Coa is mental health for everyone. And we mean everyone—poor, wealthy, younger, older—people living in countries all around the world.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: I’m really fascinated by two aspects of that. The first is the sheer potential to unlock human ambition and potential. If we think about people experiencing mental disorders, people with risk factors, people who feel shame and stigma—

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Imagine all of that falling away—and what we could all achieve as families, as communities, as nations, and as a global society. The second aspect is the social impact. If you can get access to mental health treatment just like that—no cost barrier, no waiting time—

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Why stigma? Why is this something to be ashamed of? The social impact of removing the fear from mental health and turning it into something ubiquitous—I think has the potential to transform society’s view of mental health from something to be feared to something to be embraced.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, as they say, entrepreneurship involves depression, unfortunately. And there are probably a lot of people listening to us who are dealing with it.

Alejandro Cremades: What message do you have for them?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Well, sometimes entrepreneurship feels like bipolar disorder—with radical highs and radical lows. I think you do need to be somewhat obsessive in how you think, and compulsive in how you act.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: And, in all seriousness, there is a higher rate of mental disorders among entrepreneurs and their families than in the general population.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: So I would say—blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light, right? People who have a slightly unusual take on life may bring a transformative level of innovation to seemingly intractable problems.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Maybe it’s a little bit to do with how atypical I am—that I didn’t just settle for sitting in a clinic writing prescriptions for antidepressants and antipsychotics in my career—but instead embarked on a different journey, which brought me to a different place.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: So I would say: look after yourself, celebrate your individuality, find peers and mentors who can provide support along the journey, and make sure you keep the cup topped up. You can’t pour from an empty cup.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. Now, imagine I was to put you into a time machine, Oliver, and I bring you back to that moment when maybe you were in Abu Dhabi, thinking about packing up the bags and entering the venture world. And you had the opportunity to have a chat with your younger self.

Alejandro Cremades: Let’s say that younger self is getting on a plane en route to Europe, and you’re able to sit down next to him and give him one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be, and why, given what you know now?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: I would say that at the time of the spin-out from Telefonica, the thing to do with 30 million euros in the bank is to significantly reduce the cash burn and make that 30 million last for as long as possible.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Time flies very quickly, and achieving product-market fit—even in the best of times—is a challenge. It’s really important to control your burn rate.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: So I think in the transition between Telefonica and being a VC-backed startup, we missed the opportunity to be more radical in restructuring the team and cost base to give ourselves as much time as possible.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. Oliver, for the people listening who would love to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way for them to do so?

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Drop me an email: oliver.harrison@coahealth—all one word—coahealth.com

Alejandro Cremades: Easy enough. Well, Oliver, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Dr. Oliver Harrison: Thanks, Alejandro. It’s been fun.

*****

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