At Slush 2024 in Helsinki, our Managing Partner Brett Gibson sat down with Tanay Tandon, cofounder of Athelas and CEO of Commure.

“Initialized was literally there from the very beginning, and we’re grateful for that support,” Tanay shared.

Athelas launched in 2016 with its flagship product, Athelas Home, a device designed to bring advanced blood diagnostics directly to patients. But getting the product to market wasn’t simple.

“When we first got funding, we said we’d get FDA clearance in 90 days; it took 400 days,” Tanay explained.

That determination has helped Athelas grow far beyond hardware. Today, it’s a full healthcare platform supporting 40 of the 50 top health systems in the United States.

“We have customers from 2017 who saw us as a small hardware company and watched us grow into a whole suite of medical products,” Tanay said.

Leveraging M&A to Build a Stronger Platform

“M&A played a big role in our story,” Tanay said. “We’ve done 15 key pieces of M&A over the years, including our merger with Commure in 2023.”

Tanay, now CEO of Commure, views mergers and acquisitions as a strategic tool that’s often underutilized.

“If you study the great businesses of all time, they were built on the back of M&A,” he said.

Athelas approached its merger with Commure with a clear plan. “When two multi-billion dollar companies try to join together, there are hundreds of questions about how the day-to-day would play out—and that’s normally where things fall apart,” Tanay explained. “We had a clear vision from the beginning about how things would play out.”

For Athelas, the primary focus of its M&A strategy was simple: distribution. “When you buy a company, you need to be clear about why you’re doing it. For us, it came down to distribution,” Tanay said.

Using Technology to Fix the Healthcare Crisis

Looking ahead, Tanay sees technology as the key to addressing some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. The way he sees it, the US healthcare is headed toward a crisis, and the only way to fix it is with technology.

“The most valuable asset of our company wasn’t the hardware,” Tanay shared, “but the knowledge of how to scale a healthcare practice.”

For example, a major part of Athelas’ success has been its ability to use AI to solve healthcare’s biggest pain points.

“In healthcare, for every 10 hours of admin work, there is one hour of productive work,” Tanay shared. “That’s why I was excited to apply AI in this space.”

By automating workflows and reducing administrative burdens, Athelas enables healthcare providers to focus on delivering care, improving both efficiency and outcomes.

We’ve been proud to back Athelas since 2018 and can’t wait to see how they continue pushing healthcare forward. Big thanks to the Slush team for organizing the event.