UAE-Based Syd Life AI Secures US$1 Billion Deal To Expand Its Preventive Health Platform To The US

Syd Life AI, a UK-born, UAE-based technology company advancing personalized preventive healthcare and life-quality analytics, has announced a US$1 billion partnership with Altius, a US-based investment and advisory firm, to expand its preventive health artificial intelligence (AI) platform to the US market.  

Founded by Lorena Puica in the UK in 2015, Syd Life AI uses its proprietary innovations to convert complex health data into actionable dashboards that enable organizations to spot emerging-risk groups sooner, tailor interventions accurately, and monitor clear outcomes. 

In an interview with Inc. Arabia, Puica shared how experiencing a personal health crisis in her 20s ultimately led to the creation of Syd Life AI. The experience prompted her to question not just the career in finance she had then, but also the impact she wanted to make in the world, ultimately guiding her toward founding Syd Life AI. “I never thought I'm going to leave finance, because I dream in numbers," Puica said. "I love numbers. But when you've been told when you're still in your 20s that you've got three years to live, it really changes how you look at life.” 

The experience thus became a catalyst for Puica, pushing her to look for a more meaningful, lasting healthcare solutions, rather than to accept things as they were. That search led her into nearly two years of research, analyzing studies and data, which eventually led her to found Syd Life AI, with the aim of making preventive health more accessible and enabling people to take control of their well-being.  

Launched in the UK, Syd Life AI received backing from the UK government, and it later expanded to Abu Dhabi at the invitation of Hub71, Abu Dhabi’s global tech ecosystem. According to Puica, being based in Abu Dhabi has proved extremely beneficial for her company. “I think what Abu Dhabi and the UAE has done in terms of the healthcare ecosystem has yet to be done anywhere else in the world," she said. "We've worked with the UK government, we've worked with the Japanese Tokyo municipality, we've supported Singapore—but what Abu Dhabi is doing is basically starting with the core foundation of data." 

Puica explained that the centralized collection of population health data, combined with genomic information and real-world lifestyle metrics, allows for a level of predictive insight that few other systems can achieve. “If we just take Abu Dhabi specifically, having all of the healthcare data in one place for the entire population, and then combining that with genomic data, so healthcare, hospital data, genomic data, which is the Emirati Genome Project, and then the Abu Dhabi Department of Health's Sahatna app, which is what every single person has,” she pointed out. “It combines hospital data, genetic data and real lifestyle, movement data, location, temperature, air quality, all of that.” 

Puica also praised Abu Dhabi’s forward-thinking regulations and cross-sector collaborations. “The vision behind the regulations is phenomenal, and the collaboration between institutions to make it happen is truly cutting-edge," she said. "I haven’t seen hospitals, research centers, and government entities come together so genuinely for the benefit of the population—it’s inspiring." She also noted that the UAE has been ahead of the game in this regard, citing examples like its appointment of a Minister of Happiness, or life quality key performance indicators (KPIs) for its population. "Other governments are waking up now to the fact that life quality will be an even more important KPI than economic development going forward," Puica said. "The time is now for people to take charge of their own health.”

It is within this environment that Syd Life AI’s work culminated in the Large Quantitative Model (LQM), a predictive engine built to model health indicators together with environmental and behavioral factors. “When we talk about the LQM, the large quantitative model, it's basically a next-generation predictive engine that is trained on multimodal health, lifestyle, environmental, and behavioral data sets,” Puica explained. “So, think of it as taking all the published research papers, which are more than 1.2 million research papers that cover about eight billion person years of data, but not only healthcare data, but also lifestyle as well as environmental data.” 

Puica emphasized that this was necessary to enable Syd Life AI to develop into a truly personalized solution that takes into consideration medical data, lifestyle data, but also environmental, behavioral, and genetic data to develop digital twins. “Because if you think here in the region, whether someone is dealing with diabetes and they are based in Abu Dhabi or if they are based in London, they require different recommendations,” she added. Explaining how this works in practice, Puica described the result as a kind of hyper-intelligent engine that adapts to each individual. “Think of it like a mega brain that collects all of the research and makes sense of it relative to each person's circumstances, background, ethnicity, age, gender, location, to be able to give them the most suitable and possible recommendation," she added. 

Working alongside the LQM is Syd Life AI’s second core technology, the Life Quality Index (LQI), a comprehensive framework designed to translate an individual’s full life context into actionable, personalized guidance. “Some people find it easier to change their activity, while others find it easier to change their environment, even their mindset," she added, "So, really understanding which perspective we can best support the individual is what the LQI does, to understand the 360-degree perspective, and then figure out how we can best help." And it is this type of intelligence that Puica believes will shape the future of healthcare, by putting “a prevention doctor at their fingertips every day." 

As Syd Life AI now gets set to expand into the US market, Puica noted that the milestone was not a sudden scaleup moment, but the culmination of a research-driven journey. Indeed, for Puica, expanding into the US was not just about timing, but about finding the right partner, which is what she found in Altius, whose support represented a strategic evolution for Syd Life AI. “In the previous funding round, we had investors from the US, through which we started to get to know the US market," Puica said. "We began to understand how it works, and we learned from the best. Over the past 12 months, we’ve been identifying who the right partner for the US would be. We chose Altius, because of their breadth of understanding of the US market, and their three to four decades of experience with some of the biggest companies in the US." 

Puica added that what mattered most was finding a partner for Syd Life AI that had similar goals as well as a shared vision for the future of healthcare. “The intention of the partnership was really to align with the focus and commitment now on preventive health, to bring our technology that collects all of the research, which has the data that can be hyper personalized for every employee, patient, individual, and reduce those risks and the costs before they happen,” Puica explained. 

Additionally, Puica believes that entering the US market is a signal of Syd Life AI’s maturity. “We've built a preventive health operating system for the world that can be customized even to a market as complex as the US," she said. "This $1 billion partnership is in full alignment with the US. It is a commitment now to preventive health, and the need for self-insured organizations to take charge of the health of their employees." 

Pictured in the lead image is Syd Life AI founder and CEO Lorena Puica. Courtesy of Syd Life AI.