This week, we’re excited to bring you another edition of Startup Spotlight – a recurring series where we speak with early-stage founders working on fitness and wellness startups.
We usually focus on established companies, operators, and inventors — and we’ll continue bringing you those conversations most weeks. But, from time to time, we’re highlight companies at the beginning of their journey.
Today I’m joined by Lola Priego.
Lola is the founder of Base — where they’re using at-home blood testing to improve diet, stress, sleep, and brain fog.
In this episode, we talk about putting health in the consumer’s hands, targeting potential customers beyond the realm of biohackers, and how Lola was able to raise $3.5M with a team of only five employees as a first-time founder.
About Lola Priego
Lola is the Founder and CEO of Base, the first health tracker that uses a data science app paired with at-home testing to help people feel better. Prior to founding Base, Lola was a software engineer at Amazon, Facebook and Instagram where she was focused on improving network performance. She later went on to be the Head of Engineering at a Khosla-backed startup within the lab industry space. Through her own personal health journey, Lola realized that a major discrepancy in the healthcare system is the lack of access to data around one’s health. She founded Base as a way to help people understand why they are feeling off with a data-driven approach. Base helps those users that can’t sleep, are fatigued, brain fogged or are looking for the optimal personalized diet.
Originally from Spain, Lola studied medicine for a year before transferring to engineering at the Technical University of Madrid. She then came to the United States to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology and received her Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. In her free time, Lola started a project through the organization More than Me where she goes to Liberia and teaches girls to code with tablets that she uniquely designed to work offline.