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Today’s feature outlines our interview with Amie Leighton, the Co-Founder and CEO of Allia Health, a start-up in the healthcare industry using data and artificial intelligence to improve how we evaluate and diagnose mental illnesses.
Amie’s story is truly inspiring; her work in the mental health industry stems from her own experiences. Furthermore, she simultaneously created Allia Health alongside reading Geography at Oxford. The Pragmat Team would like to thank Amie for the time taken to interview with us, and for the valuable advice and insight she has offered.
First of all, can you tell us what Allia Health consists of?
It is artificial generative intelligence supporting mental health clinicians towards making the best decisions possible. We collect lots of different types of data, from wearables, speech data, medical records, blood tests and, going forward, even brain scans. We then use AI to analyse it to help clinicians make better decisions around what treatment a specific person might need.
How did your entrepreneurial journey begin?
From my lived experience I gained a better perspective on how systems evaluate mental health conditions, spending a couple of years in inpatient care with anorexia. I was really lucky to rapidly recover once I had received the right diagnosis and treatment. My experience revealed the inadequacy of current methods used to evaluate mental health conditions; they are all based on subjective information. For example, you may go into a doctor’s office where they simply ask how you’re feeling. For other conditions this would seem ridiculous; it’d be like cardiologists asking you how your heart feels. Similarly, this is insufficient in the context of mental health conditions.
Ultimately, I wanted a way that we could more successfully incorporate data to support clinical decisions, whether that was through tracking treatments, progress and relapses. I had dabbled with the idea of this in an academic context, but this can often create a distance between the real world and theoretical knowledge. Therefore, a startup was a natural progression for me.
Coming from quite a different academic background to your current role, how did you know that this was a change you wanted to make in terms of your career path? Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
I never really had much of an idea about my career, but I didn’t think I would have particularly suited a corporate environment. I find the freedom and flexibility my job offers me, not only in terms of choosing when I want to work, but in terms of choosing what I want to work on and which ideas to pursue, much more fitting. Another benefit to entrepreneurial jobs is you can find yourself in positions that would never have occurred if you followed a more traditional route. To be honest, I didn’t have a good perspective of what being an entrepreneur involved before I started. It’s good to remember that even if you feel like you don’t know how anything works it’s never too late to learn. Expose yourself to as much as possible, there are millions of events out there to help you get to grips with things!
How has your degree impacted your journey?
Geography is all about space and time, so a really large part of my curriculum looked at big data and how it changes over time. I think this nature of geography as a subject became part of my way of thinking. I questioned why when people gather our medical data, they do not consider how it has changed over time or how it changes once you get a particular condition. Therefore the biggest impact my degree had on me starting Allia Health was from a conceptual position.
How did you balance your time between studying and your startup?
You can spend a surprising amount of time twiddling your thumbs in life and doing unnecessary tasks. You have to get really good at prioritising, asking yourself ‘What is actually required to get me to the next step?’ and ‘Is what I'm doing right now the most relevant task?’. Something I find really helpful is the philosophy of ‘eating the frog’. I like to do the most important thing that day first, and then move onto the other things.
Do you have any advice about getting funding?
It’s hard to get funding to get someone to believe in you when you have no social proof but the thing to remember is once you get some it’s much easier to get more. Funding takes practice, it is almost a mentality. You can take people's advice, but ultimately you have to find your own way of doing it. It’s not just about being confident, but it’s how you explain something and what gets people excited. It's a sale. Listen to sales podcasts, and TikToks on how to sell, they can have some really good tips on there. Then, if you can, get yourself as much exposure and opportunities as possible; you can find what works for you.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced as a young female CEO?
You can be placed in very threatening environments in which you are quite vulnerable. With a startup there is no HR, so if there is an issue there’s no one you can go to. Worse still, if you are put in a bad situation and report it, you can create a bad reputation for yourself. Right or wrong, this can damage your business and your prospects.
A second challenge is the way in which you express yourself in a male-dominated space. Most rooms you go into, you will be the only female there. The communication between yourself and everyone else can be tricky to navigate if you don’t connect as easily as they do. The systematic issue with investors can stem from this; people in decision-making roles, often males, want to invest in people like themselves. Conversations can then hold a more negative tone towards females. Often when a male counterpart gets the response, ‘That sounds great, what next?’, a female counterpart is given, ‘What if this goes wrong?’. This countering is challenging because it harms confidence and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. My advice is to get introduced to females in the same workplace as you- if you get on their radar, they can make an immense difference by looking out for you!
Why do you think there is such a challenge for people struggling with mental health issues today?
I think one of the biggest challenges is people don’t know where to start. There is so much advice, from friends, from people online, saying what did or didn’t work for them. It can be overwhelming, especially when people don’t truly know what they are struggling with or why.
People’s judgements around their struggles can also get clouded. Because people live with them for so long, struggles can become ingrained into how they experience life, warping their sense of normality. Due to this, medical professionals may not have a good perspective on what each patient is experiencing and appropriate intervention is difficult to implore. So I think that is one of the biggest challenges people face; they don’t know what to do.
Finally, what three books/podcasts would you recommend to our readers that have significantly impacted you or your entrepreneurial journey?
Business Insider- It’s not a book but their articles can be really helpful
The a16z Podcast- which are venture fund podcasts, you can find ones related to your industry. They have VCs interviewing domain experts around specific topic areas, which can provide two really interesting lenses.
‘Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health’- by Thomas Insel. if anybody wants to work in the mental health space, I think it’s probably the most valuable book you can read.
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