Ali Parsa is an Iranian engineer and serial healthcare entrepreneur. Like Arc Health’s Dr. Zubair Ahmed and Nava’s Kareem Zaki, Parsa draws on technology to improve healthcare.
The engineer won an Entrepreneurial Achievement award from the Independent Healthcare Awards for his first healthcare startup Circle. Parsa has appeared in The Times’ 100 People to Watch and the Maserati 100 list of influential entrepreneurs.
Parsa’s latest business endeavor is Babylon Health. The digital health company uses artificial intelligence to increase access to affordable healthcare through handheld and wearable devices.
“When AI can diagnose more accurately than human doctors, it will be negligent for doctors to ignore its capability,” he told London’s Evening Standard. “We’re building technology no one else has.”
Ali Parsa: Engineer, Investment Banker, Entrepreneur
Parsa co-founded his first company, V&G (Victorian & Gilan) while earning his PhD in 1990. The media promotion company built a clientele from names including The Times, The Guardian, and the BBC. In 1993 the Prince of Wales presented Parsa with the Royal Award for Young Entrepreneur of the Year.
In 1995, Parsa sold V&G in 1995 to work in investment banking. “I saw what investment bankers made,” Parsa said about the process of selling V&G. “I thought: ‘Why don’t I do that?’”
The entrepreneur started at Credit Suisse First Boston and later led corporate finance at Credit Suisse Group AG. In 1997, Parsa began working in UK investment banking and technology for Merrill Lynch. He became executive director of Goldman Sachs’ European technology investment banking division in 1999.
In 2004 Parsa co-founded Circle after a stay in a private hospital for knee surgery. The private company operates National Health Service (NHS) hospitals and quickly became the largest healthcare partnership in Europe.
“I thought: ‘If this is the best they can offer, surely I can do better,’” he said. Parsa remained with Circle until the company went public in 2012.
Following his departure from Circle, Parsa used what he learned about healthcare to launch his next endeavor. The serial entrepreneur founded Babylon in 2013.
“Most of healthcare has little to do with hospitals. It’s what happens before and after,” explained Parsa. “I looked at the technology that exists today, and I thought: ‘What if you could do with healthcare what Google did with information?’ Put the healthcare most people need on the devices most already have.”
Ali Parsa fled the Iranian Revolution at 16
Parsa was born in Rasht, the capital of Iran’s Gilan Province, in 1965. At 16 years old, Parsa fled to London during the Iranian Revolution. He left his parents and middle-class family behind.
“You bring all sorts of psychological issues with you [as a refugee],” Parsa said. “You’ve left your parents, friends. At night I took sleeping pills. I’d seen things no teenagers should see. Absolute poverty. People who’ve run out of money and will do anything to survive. You see the best and the worst of humanity.”
After arriving in England, Parsa learned English and acquired the books to pass his O-levels and A-levels. He went on to study civil engineering at University College London. He then won a scholarship to attain his PhD in engineering physics.
Parsa is married to Scottish-Canadian banker Mairi Johnson, with whom he has three children. Johnson is Chief Partnerships Officer at Babylon Health.
Parsa founded Babylon Health
Babylon Health is partnered with the UK’s National Health Service. The platform offers a subscription service, GP at Hand, to NHS members in the UK and abroad. In 2018 there were 30,000 service members using Babylon. Now there are 100,000.
“You just have to switch from your local GP to us,” Parsa explained. “We are paid by NHS England for your care in the same way as your local GP practice is. You can have as many on-screen appointments as you like, as often as you like, but one in nine times we will ask you to come into one of our centres in London.”
Babylon Health’s aim is to make general practitioners quickly available to anyone using handheld technology. The platform offers 24/7 virtual consultations, triage, and health assessment via a subscription service. Medical records and current vital signs, measured through wearable tech, are also available through the service.
Parsa himself wears a ring that “measures my heartbeat and shows with precision when I will get ill. Three days before any visible symptoms my resting heartbeat rises, showing my body is fighting something,” he said.
Babylon Health now has over 170 global partners in 5 continents and more than 4.5 million members across the world.
“Two-and-a-half thousand years ago you would go to the square in Babylon — it was called the Square of the Sick, I think — and citizens, if they’d come across your ailment, would share how they’d recovered,” Parsa explained. “As a result of that simple peer-to-peer model, it has been estimated that Babylon had the longest life expectancy of any city in the world.”
