Meet the Startup: Wellx
Prototypes by UI Design Students
In this series of startup profiles, we speak to the people behind the startups that provide real-life design challenges to our students. Today, we speak to Anushka Patchava, co-founder of Wellx.
Anushka, can you tell us a little about your company and your current team?
Founded in 2022, Wellx is a health and insurtech business based out of Dubai.
The first version of the Wellx app was launched in 2022 and focused on engaging users towards leading healthier lives, through tracking their activities, sleep and steps data, and participating in challenges, gamifying and rewarding participation. Since then, the proposition has evolved into one that not only empowers users, preventing illness, but also is looking to serve insurance customers with digital health and chronic conditions management. The company’s vision consists of two things:
- A mission to build, create and empower healthier, happier and more resilient communities globally
- A vision to make healthy fun and make health hassle free.
The team consists of three co-founders: myself (Anushka), as the newest co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Vaibhav Kashyap as CEO and Javed Akberali as Managing Director.
The current team work out of the Dubai Innovation Hub in DIFC. We’re a vibrant team filled with 8 different nationalities and a geneder balanced team, which we’re really proud of.
What design challenges have you supplied to Experience Haus?
The briefs we’ve supplied to Experience Haus have been very broad. The first was to find one unique feature to add to the second version of the app and that was really around trying to understand our customer better, and what creates virality in an application like ours which is bridging the health and insurance space.
The second brief was a complete re-design and re-skinning of the app, which resulted in it not only being designed in dark mode, but also included a complete re-jigging of the information architecture, data infrastructure and user experience as a whole.
The final brief (which is currently being worked on) was to bring in new features such as chronic disease management and digital health into an app which is predominantly wellbeing orientated. So how do we make the app more insurance centric and create a brand that is trusted, as well as relied upon for advice in health and wellbeing.
What did the individual student/teams of students manage to produce for you?
The individuals and teams have managed to produce several things for us, including:
- UX & UI have been looked at and information architecture changed
- The customer journeys in the app have been enhanced, whether that’s goal setting or challenge setting
- Dashboard creation for all wellbeing and health metrics they track
- Thoughts on how to integrate digital health and chronic disease within the app
- Had different designs (eg. dark mode) and different colour palettes used in the app
- New brand being created called Healthx for an insurance-only app, which is another product we’re building and about to release
How have you been able to implement the outputs?
We’ve not been able to implement everything as of yet, but most of the features designed by the students at Experience Haus are on our roadmap. They key parameters we have implemented so far are improving the customer journey and information architecture. We’re now looking to bring in the digital health over the next few weeks.
What did you enjoy most about working on a project with Experience Haus?
The people! Experience Haus designers, whether they’re full-time or students, are engaging, deliberate in what they want to achieve, really fun to work with, and inquisitive. It’s great as a stakeholder to form partnerships with them and create ideas together, but to also be challenged by them! The tenacity and challenge they bring to a co-founder like myself, who might be stuck in a bit too much detail, is fantastic.
We love the office site. It’s amazing and gives us another space to think in London, given our team is based out of Dubai. It’s always great to go in there and meet friendly faces and understand a bit more about the wider business, and be welcomed in that space.
We’ve actually hired several Experience Haus students as interns and we hope to give even some of them full-time roles in our business (funding dependent!) This is because we truly believe they really embody our values which are around curiosity, creativity, honestly, integrity, and just pure passion for developing and improving the health and wellbeing space. A lot of them share our mission and bring their own sense of purpose to the work we do at Wellx, which is fantastic.
Where do you see the company in 5 years?
In 5 years, we hope to be sold! We would like to be acquired. We hope to build a platform that is incredibly useful to the population that we’re working with (which is currently the GCC), but soon to be more broadly the Middle East. We want to make an impact. We really believe in creating that mission statement of healthier, happier, more resilient communities, and in 5 years’ time once we’ve achieved that, we hope to be able to sell to either an insurance company, health provider, government, or whoever will buy it, and have created a really incredible user centric platform ecosystem that will then live on while we go do other things, probably working with health and wellbeing again, or maybe a more emerging market or more undersold communities.
We hope we’re still Wellx, but hope to be bigger than Wellx. We hope by that point we’re in the top 100 insurtech list globally, and we hope to be a well recognised and respected brand in the health and wellbeing ecosystem.
Find out more about Anushka:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dranushka-patchava
Submit a Design Challenge for an Experience Haus student: https://experiencehaus.com/submit-a-project-brief/
