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In 2014, Ron Zohar and his partner Jonathan set out to do something nobody had done: turn the smartphone camera into a medical device.
It took years. Physics, lighting, every kind of phone. A dipstick, an app, and an algorithm that let patients test themselves at home.
Then the email arrived. FDA clearance, a first in the world.
That should have been the end of the story. It was the middle.
In this episode of Aggaeus, Haggai Klorman-Eraqi sits down with Ron Zohar, Co-Founder & CEO of Healthy.io, for an honest conversation about building in healthcare, riding the rocket up, and what happens when the rules change under you.
Healthy.io raised more than $200 million, sold through Boots and the NHS in the UK, and became a poster child for at-home testing. Its focus: chronic kidney disease, where a simple urine test (ACR) that guidelines call for every year is done only about 20% of the time.
Then a change to how one key quality measure counted results hit the company’s core business. What followed was a regroup, hard decisions about the team, a leadership change, and a choice: exhaust the runway, or rebuild.
Ron chose to rebuild. Healthy.io 2.0 brings in new biochemistry and a fully quantitative test, built on 13 years of foundations, now with AI multiplying what a small team can do.
In this episode, we cover:
• How a physics student and a phone-camera idea became an FDA-cleared medical device
• Why kidney disease screening is a massive, missed opportunity
• What founders from tech get wrong (and right) when they enter healthcare
• How one regulatory decision can rewrite a company’s business model
• Leading through layoffs, a leadership change, and October 7th
• Why Healthy.io is rebuilding instead of folding
• How a medical device company uses AI while staying deliberately careful
This is a conversation about resilience, healthcare, regulation, and the difference between reaching the peak and staying in the game.
Chapters
00:00 Cold open: the FDA email
00:45 Meet Ron Zohar
02:09 From physics student to first startup
06:19 Learning to scale at Fiverr
07:11 The birth of Healthy.io
14:18 Why healthcare needs to come home
16:59 The kidney test most people never take
21:16 Teaching ourselves healthcare, and the Theranos years
30:25 First in the world: FDA clearance for a phone camera
33:46 The rug pull: when the rules changed
39:01 From the peak to the pit
50:29 Healthy.io 2.0: inventing new biochemistry
55:13 Where Healthy.io is now
1:02:05 What patients taught them
1:06:22 AI inside a medical device company
Let’s Connect:
Ron Zohar on LinkedIn
Healthy.io
Haggai Klorman-Eraqi on LinkedIn
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