Aktivo Labs Wants to Give You One Number for Your Health

There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from a health app. It counts your steps, congratulates you, and leaves you exactly where you started - staring at a number that means nothing to anyone but you. Aktivo Labs, a digital health-science company founded in Singapore in 2017, started from a harder question: what if that number could mean something to the people who pay for your care?

The answer is the Aktivo Score, a composite figure from 1 to 99 that estimates an individual's risk of developing chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease. It is built from data most people already generate without thinking - how much they move, how long they sit, how they sleep - pulled from major wearables and phone health apps. The company calls it a digital biomarker. In plain terms, it is a health reading taken without a needle.

01 / THE PRODUCTA score you can actually move

Most health metrics are static. Your cholesterol reading is a snapshot from a morning you'd rather forget. The Aktivo Score is different in that it moves. Walk more this week, sit less, sleep on a schedule, and it responds. That responsiveness is the point - it turns an abstract risk into something a person can see change.

Under the score sits the harder engineering: integrating messy inputs from dozens of devices, cleaning them, and compressing exercise, sedentary time and sleep into a single defensible figure. That last word matters. Plenty of apps invent a wellness number. Very few build one an actuary is willing to stand behind.

02 / THE CUSTOMERThe person using it is rarely the buyer

Here is the detail that reorganizes everything else about the company. The individual tapping through the Aktivo app is usually a policyholder or an employee. The customer writing the check is a life insurer, a health insurer, a reinsurer, or a corporate wellness program. Aktivo Labs sells business-to-business, and then business-to-consumer through those partners - the classic B2B2C shape.

This is a deliberate escape from the trap that swallows most consumer health apps: retention. Getting a stranger to open a wellness app every day is brutal. Getting an insurer to distribute it to a book of policyholders, then improve the underlying risk pool, is a different game with different economics. The insurer distributes. The person engages. The risk pool improves. Everyone in the chain has a reason to care.

03 / THE PROBLEMA bill measured in trillions

Chronic disease is the expensive, slow-moving crisis of modern healthcare - and it is largely shaped by daily behavior. Mukherjee has framed the stakes bluntly, talking publicly about a coming healthcare bill measured in the trillions. The insurance industry feels this directly: it prices risk it cannot see and pays for outcomes it could not prevent.

Aktivo Labs treats prevention as a data problem rather than a motivation problem. The bet is that if you can measure risk continuously and make it legible to both the person and the payer, you can bend the curve before a claim is ever filed. Aggregated, the scores also give insurers a population-health lens - a way to see the risk sitting inside a book of business.

04 / THE PORTFOLIOFrom one score to a health platform

A single metric is a feature. A portfolio is a platform, and that is the direction Aktivo Labs has taken. The Score anchors the system; the rest widen it into new corners of health.

For a company selling to insurers, the least glamorous slide often closes the deal. HIPAA, GDPR and ISO 27001 alignment are not footnotes here - they are the price of entry to a conversation with a risk-averse buyer holding millions of records.

05 / THE PEOPLEA surgeon, a scientist, an operator

The founding team reads like a deliberate assembly of the three things this problem needs. The late Professor David Lai was a Stanford- and Harvard-trained cardio-thoracic surgeon - the clinical authority. Dr. Meng-Han Kuok holds a biotechnology PhD from Cambridge - the science. Gourab Mukherjee, the CEO, brought the background in commercializing digital health - the operator who turns research into a business.

Lai has since passed away, and the company has continued building the science he helped start. It is a quiet reminder that a company can be built to outlive any single founder - that a mission, once institutionalized, keeps moving.

06 / THE BACKINGWhy Mitsui showed up

In December 2022, Aktivo Labs closed a US$10 million Series A led by Mitsui & Co., the Japanese trading house, with participation from SEEDS Capital - the investment arm of Enterprise Singapore - along with Adaptive Capital Partners, HH Investments and Govin Capital. The capital was earmarked for data-science capabilities, team growth, and geographic expansion into Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States and Japan.

A trading giant like Mitsui leading a health-data round is a signal in itself: the interest in longevity science is no longer confined to healthcare specialists. It is strategic, cross-industry, and increasingly global.

07 / THE MARKETWhere it sits

Aktivo Labs lives at the intersection of digital health and insurtech, alongside players such as dacadoo, Discovery's Vitality and Sprout Wellness. What separates it is the insistence on a defensible, dynamic biomarker rather than a generic engagement score, paired with a portfolio that reaches into mental health, diabetes and the microbiome. The August 2025 alliance with South Africa's Lifecheq pushed the model further, stitching online wellness engagement to offline, advisor-led insurance sales across Asia and Africa.

08 / TIMELINEThe short history

The through-line is consistent. Aktivo Labs is not trying to make you live forever. It is trying to make your health legible - to you, and to the people who insure it - and betting that legibility, more than motivation, is what actually changes behavior.