Babylon founder Ali Parsa returns with new healthcare AI venture

Ali Parsa the founder of defunct health AI firm Babylon Health is back with new healthcare AI launch Qu, which aims to provide personal digital clinical assistants.

Announcing the beta launch of the venture on a Linkedin post, dated 12 November 2024, Parsa said “Qu is meant to support the varied ways care is delivered globally. By making Qu comprehensive, controllable, and customisable, we aim to help healthcare professionals maintain control of AI’s utility, safety, and quality”.

Babylon briefly soared to a valuation of £4.2bn in a 2021 New York listing, only to spectacularly crash and burn within two years as it proved unable to deliver on promises, spread efforts too thin internationally and with contracts it was losing money on hand over fist.

But less than two years after the demise of Babylon, Parsa is back and again targeting health AI.

Parsa said in his Linkedin post that he has been busy  in the interim: “We assembled an experienced team of scientists, technologists, and clinical innovators across the globe to address the main challenge in healthcare: the structural imbalance between the elastic demand from our communities and the constrained supply of our clinicians”.

The focus sounds similar to that of Babylon Health, founded in 2014, which used pre-generative AI aimed to provide chatbot-driven virtual diagnostic and triage services. In the NHS these were focused on remote GP services.

With endorsement from serving health secretary Matt Hancock, Parsa was able to position Babylon as the UK’s digital health trailblazer. The company won some valuable NHS virtual GP contracts in London and Birmingham, but the technology failed to match the considerable hype.

In his LinkedIn post, Parsa said: “Recent developments in AI, while still in their infancy, offer hope that we can finally address this imbalance by creating an elastic source of clinical supply support.

“Qu’s cognitive architecture of expanding agents is designed to support clinicians not just for a single task but across the full stack of routine clinical and administrative tasks, patient interactions, decision-making, chronic and postoperative care, continuous monitoring and support, and in multiple languages.”

He added: “Once the foundation is right, we will open Qu for every clinician everywhere, enabling each to make it their own personal AI assistant and customise it according to their needs and way of working. This is just the beginning.”

Qu has been backed with funding from Swedish VC Norrsken, with its parent company Quadrivia Limited, listing Norrsken as holding 638,000 shares in the company.

Niklas Adalberth, founder of Norrsken VC said in a press release: “We’re backing Quadrivia because we believe the company has a unique capability to help cure healthcare’s biggest pains.

“Our mission is to support ventures with the potential to make a global impact at scale, and Quadrivia has the capability to create a more accessible healthcare system worldwide by freeing up clinicians to focus on what matters most—patients.”