Editor’s note: This interview is part of a Q&A series with winners of the ORIGIN Innovation Awards 2020. Aktivolabs is a winner in the category Startup Awards–HealthTech.


Businesses are increasingly appreciating the value of data in their respective industries, and healthcare includes several verticals that benefit from data-driven insights. In this TechNode Global Q&A with Gourab Mukherjee, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Aktivolabs, we learn how a focus on data can change the dynamics of the insurance industry through a device-agnostic approach.

While insurance providers would traditionally only get customer data at the start of a policy or once users submit a claim, there is a big untapped potential in optimizing what actually happens in-between, said Mukherjee, an experienced professional in building business lines globally in the digital health space.

What is the background behind Aktivolabs?

Gourab Mukherjee, Co-Founder & CEO, Aktivolabs
Gourab Mukherjee, Co-Founder & CEO, Aktivolabs

This journey of Aktivolabs began in 2016 when I met co-founder Professor David Lai at the Ageing Asia Innovation Forum at Marina Bay Sands. Apart from directing surgical research at the National University Hospital (NUH), Professor Lai–a cardiac surgeon trained in Stanford, Harvard, Toronto, and Sydney–was engaged in projects concerning sustainable aging.

Professor Lai and I share the common understanding that chronic diseases today are not just a function of age and genetics, but also a function of the unintended effects of one’s lifestyle and longer lifespan.

Two co-founders with contrasting specializations that complemented each other, we had the idea of delaying the onset of chronic diseases across populations by accelerating the self-quantification movement in health and wellbeing, which finally led to the genesis of Aktivolabs and the Aktivo Score®.

Four years on, the Aktivolabs team has grown to 25 members across Singapore and India consisting of highly motivated and accomplished doctors, clinicians, data scientists, engineers, digital health experts, and key opinion leaders from the banking and insurance industries.

What are the emerging trends in the insurance industry that HealthTech and InsurTech companies need to address with innovation?

Insurance, reinsurance, banks, corporations, and telecommunication companies are increasingly looking to stand out in a competitive market by leveraging the rising permeation of digital technology in everyday lives, particularly real-time digital health data to better manage risk on their books and build innovative and hyper-personalized products to acquire and retain customers.

Consumers are also demanding value-added services from their insurers and banks, which further drives innovative products and solutions and the growing self-quantification movement in health and wellness.

What are the three key challenges that you are addressing?

  1. Fresh data: Insurance, reinsurance, banks, corporations, and telecommunication companies, and banks face an issue with getting up-to-date data on their policyholders and customers. Data is typically obtained only during the inception of a policy, at point-of-sale, or at the point of a claim.
  2. Engagement Touchpoints: Enterprises and especially insurers in general face difficulties in building up engagement with their customers. Wellness initiatives provide a context-appropriate medium of engagement for Life and health insurers.
  3. Reactive to Proactive: Enterprises are seeking to differentiate themselves by taking a more proactive stance in addressing risk and promoting the health and wellness of the customers. Wellness initiatives allow enterprises to utilize on-going data to offer personalized value-added services.

How is Aktivolabs addressing these challenges?

Aktivolabs helps insurance, reinsurance, banks, corporations, and telecommunication companies to understand their clients’ health in real-time.

The Aktivo Score®, which is a proprietary digital biomarker for health and longevity, addresses the challenge of analyzing real-time physical lifestyle data to scientifically quantify the risk of developing chronic disease on a daily basis.

Aktivo® Health’s suite of products is device-agnostic and can be used by simply using a smartphone, thereby solving the massive challenge of bringing large populations using different devices and mobile OS onto a single platform.

The Aktivo® Gamify solution allows users to understand and make positive behavioral changes in a fun and meaningful way.

By adopting best practices from nudge theory and gamification frameworks, Aktivolabs is transforming how populations are consistently engaged in a conversation around health and wellness.

What makes Aktivolabes unique in addressing these industry opportunities?

  • Device and Platform Agnostic: Aktivo® Health can be deployed across populations on both iOS and Android, and can connect and collect physiological data from a wide selection of fitness trackers ranging from Apple Watch to Fitbit.
  • Low Touch: Aktivo® Health does not require a fitness tracker or any manual inputs from the user to calculate the Aktivo Score®. All you need is a smartphone to get started.
  • Actuarial Insights: The Aktivo® platform uses real-time data from smartphones and wearable devices to predict and prevent chronic disease. Insurance, reinsurance, banks, corporations and telecommunication companies, and banks use Aktivo® products to maintain the health of their clients.
  • Digital Therapeutics:  Founded and run by a multidisciplinary team, Aktivolabs brings together world-class expertise in medicine, data science, and product engineering to address the gap in the health and wellness space by building the best-in-class digital health tools for the self-management of chronic disease that are scalable and affordable.

Featured image credit: Unsplash