This Entrepreneur Raised 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 is the founder and CEO of Koa Health, leveraging his medical expertise and leadership skills in health to pioneer a future where digital tools democratize mental health services globally.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

A Life Shaped by Curiosity and Compassion

Born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, just north of London, Oliver grew up in a nurturing environment where intellectual exploration was encouraged. His parents, though not wealthy, invested heavily in his and his brother’s private education. They encouraged their interests in the world.

While his brother pursued a Ph.D. in engineering, Oliver was drawn to medicine from an early age, specifically to the enigmatic terrain of the human brain. He attended UCL, studying medicine and neuroscience, before training in psychiatry and mental health at Imperial College

Later, Oliver deepened his expertise in public health at Johns Hopkins. He also conducted research into how the brain functions using MRI scanners at Queen Square Hospital, focusing on the human consciousness and the processing of visual information in particular.

Early in his medical practice, sometime in 2000, Oliver realized that the demand for mental health care was rapidly increasing, but the supply of professionals could never keep pace. Due to the time and money required to train a mental health professional, waiting times have grown longer.

Around this time, Oliver became keenly interested in digital technology, particularly after the first dot-com bubble burst, which opened up access to mental health services.

Turning Tragedy into Mission

This imbalance in the availability of expert care became painfully personal when Oliver lost two close friends to suicide, both on waiting lists for NHS mental health services. The tragedy cemented his conviction that technology had to be part of the solution.

Oliver began exploring how digital platforms could expand access to mental healthcare. He joined McKinsey to learn how to apply data and technology to complex systems, spending five years tackling global healthcare challenges.

Later, as Director of Public Health in Abu Dhabi, Oliver led major public health initiatives, partnering with organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), pharmaceutical companies, Optum, and IBM. They successfully improved life expectancy through data-driven programs.

These programs targeted diabetes, heart disease, cancer, road accidents, and infectious diseases

A Moonshot with Telefonica

Oliver’s global perspective and cross-disciplinary expertise caught the attention of Telefónica, one of the world’s largest telecom giants. They were launching Alpha, an innovation lab modeled after Google X.

The program was designed to complement their venture capital investments and their Telefónica eMas Day and R&D initiatives, which focused on improving core services such as mobile phones and internet connectivity.

Ultimately, the ambitious Moonshot project was an intersection of three aspects. Firstly, a massive social challenge worldwide that needed to be solved with the help of emerging technology.

Here, Telefónica had a unique advantage due to its access to data and understanding of various markets worldwide. Mental health was at the top of their list. Oliver was recruited to lead what would become Koa Health because of his background and experience.

Koa Health was founded to address the global supply-demand gap in mental healthcare. The mission was clear: develop scalable, digital-first solutions that could offer early detection, personalized care, and cost-effective treatments.

What Koa Health Does

Koa Health operates across three core pillars:

• Detection: Utilizing ubiquitous technology, such as smartphones that everyone carries, rather than wearables, allows for the detection of mental health symptoms. Issues like depression and anxiety can be identified early, either when they first appear or as they evolve over time into a chronic condition.
• Personalization: Leveraging algorithms to deliver the right care to the right person at the right moment.
• Scalable Approaches to Treatment: Offering digital tools for everyday mental health support to people who are below the threshold for clinical diagnosis and clinical treatment. It also offers digital technologies and clinically validated programs for diagnosed mental disorders and conditions. This ensures treatment with significantly less clinician time while achieving better outcomes.

Koa Health integrates its technology stack into a software platform that offers clinical services through partnerships with provider organizations across various countries.

The result–improved outcomes, earlier detection, earlier intervention, less suffering, and dramatically reduced costs, especially for the seven most common mental disorders.

As Oliver explains, identifying the early signs of developing a mental disorder helps in treatment with significantly less clinician time, which is more scalable and affordable.

Oliver’s Perspective on Mental Health

Oliver recalls that very early in his career, he had decided that being a doctor was not about sitting in a clinic writing prescriptions. He saw too many limitations in that model, since he could only treat a certain number of people per day.

However, creating a new technology would enable him to help millions of people worldwide. Oliver became very interested in the idea of being a technology doctor and developing technology that could improve health outcomes.

Oliver underscores his deep respect for how medicine is practiced traditionally. “We will always need people who work in clinics, operating theaters, and hospitals,” he points out. However, he wanted to pursue a different path that combined medicine and technology.

Oliver has always been fascinated by the “one kilo of jelly” that sits inside the human head. It is responsible for imagination, emotion, memory, creativity, and “everything that we love about people and what makes us really special as a species and as individual citizens.”

We are only just beginning to understand how this most complicated organism in the universe works. It is essentially hundreds of billions of cells interacting in chemical, electronic, and many metaphysical ways.

The rapid increase in the number of mental disorders has brought it to the top of the priority list in healthcare systems, families, and communities around the world.

There are valid concerns about the impact of mental disorders on labour market participation, employment, long-term or short-term absence from work, and workplace productivity levels. This is why Telefónica got involved in the space.

From Corporate Incubator to Independent Startup

Despite the strong backing from Telefonica, spinning Koa Health out into an independent venture was no easy feat. Oliver likens it to “an elephant in bed with a mouse.” The sheer size and processes of the corporation could easily crush a small team’s agility.

Still, the partnership gave Koa access to financial support and world-class universities, including Oxford, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, University College London, and NHS England. Koa also leveraged 600 million mobile user data points (anonymized) and the reputation of a global brand.

It used the data to train algorithms and do deep science. Eventually, a combination of internal motivation and external pressures, notably the financial impact of COVID-19 on Telefónica, prompted Koa to enter the market.

Without a commercial team or public presence, the startup was an independent, venture capital-backed company, looking to build its profit and loss statement and start generating revenues.

Oliver recalls that they had to learn quickly how to navigate product-market fit, hire salespeople, and build brand awareness from the ground up. Ultimately, business is about getting the basics right efficiently and economically.

Raising Capital: From Idea to Oversubscribed Series A

The fundraising journey began in 2019, as Koa prepared to monetize Evermind, its first product. Evermind was a prevention-focused platform that would eventually be branded as Koa Foundations. Over 18 months, Oliver and his team pitched to nearly 170 VCs.

What caught investor attention wasn’t just the mission—it was the company’s robust patent portfolio. London-based Ancora Finance Group led the Series A round after discovering Koa at a mental health conference.

They valued the discipline surrounding IP protection, increasing from 20 patents to 56. They facilitated introductions to other major investors, including Wellington Partners, MTIP AG, Asabys Partners, Alma Mundi Ventures, Akilia Partners, and others.

Despite the challenges of fundraising entirely via Zoom during the pandemic, Koa successfully closed an oversubscribed €30M Series A ($34.12), marking its transition from corporate-backed incubator to independent, VC-funded startup.

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Scaling Up Amid a Global Mental Health Crisis

Following the funding, Koa expanded to 67 employees and served over 500 clients. However, the early phase was not without obstacles. Koa Health had no website, public presence, marketing materials, or salespeople.

The pandemic made it challenging to break through the noise, and initial go-to-market efforts, which targeted prevention tools for enterprise, ran into stiff competition from well-established brands like Calm and Headspace.

Koa persevered, balancing revenue generation from consulting with medical device and pharmaceutical partners while continuing to develop more advanced, clinically-focused products.

Their deep experience with predictive AI and therapeutics, dating back over a decade, enabled Koa to develop a clinical solution that differed from the competition. It has positioned them well to benefit from the recent surge in interest in generative technology.

AI and the Future of Healthcare

From Oliver’s perspective, over the next few years, the combination of increasingly powerful and ubiquitous computing, particularly the cloud transformation, will emerge. This means that through the web, we can get access to powerful computing.

Advances in mathematics, combined with imagination and creativity, will yield transformative technology. Oliver views AI not as a fleeting trend, but as a foundational enabler of next-generation healthcare.

With breakthroughs like protein folding and drug simulation, and tools like ChatGPT passing the Turing test, the possibilities are immense. Oliver looks back at the time when the drug discovery at Cambridge would start with a million drug candidates.

Scientists would try each one in the lab to see which one binds to the receptor. Thanks to AI, this process can now be completed at a fraction of the cost, time, and effort. Society is now digitized, and AI and data are present in every sector, including healthcare, travel, banking, and finance.

In Koa’s case, AI underpins predictive tools, personalized care plans, and scalable therapeutic interventions. But it also raises the bar for privacy, ethics, and trust, areas that Koa addresses with clinical rigor and robust data governance.

The Vision: Mental Health for Everyone

Koa’s long-term goal is simple but profound: “Mental health for everyone.” That means no waiting lists, no cost barriers, and no stigma. Oliver believes in a world where mental health support is as ubiquitous and normalized as logging steps on a pedometer or tracking sleep cycles.

This vision goes beyond health outcomes—it’s about unlocking human potential. By removing the barriers to unaddressed mental disorders, societies can become more creative, compassionate, and capable.

Lessons from the Edge: Mental Health and Entrepreneurship

As a founder, Oliver knows firsthand the mental toll that entrepreneurship can take. “Sometimes it feels like bipolar disorder,” he jokes, swinging between euphoria and exhaustion. You need to be obsessive in how you think and compulsive in how you act.

But Oliver also believes entrepreneurs’ unique perspectives, compulsions, and creative quirks are what drive innovation. His advice to founders is both practical and empathetic:

• Control your burn rate early, especially after a big raise.
• Find mentors and peers who understand the journey and are willing to provide the support you need.
• Take care of your mental wellbeing—you can’t pour from an empty cup.

Final Thought: A Doctor, But Not the Kind You Expect

Oliver Harrison never stopped being a doctor—he simply expanded the scope of his practice. By combining neuroscience, public health, global leadership, and technology, he’s delivering care at a scale no clinic ever could.

Through Koa Health, Oliver is proving that digital solutions can bridge the global mental health gap, not by replacing clinicians, but by extending their reach and by putting prevention, support, and recovery tools into the hands of everyone, everywhere.

Oliver’s is not just a startup story, but a moonshot mission with the power to transform how the world thinks about, treats, and lives with mental health.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• 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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