Somewhere in America right now, a 44-year-old with no symptoms is lying inside a Prenuvo MRI machine in a $3 billion facility in Redwood City, California. An hour later, a board-certified radiologist - one of over 80 on Prenuvo's staff - will tell them something no doctor ever has: exactly what is happening inside their body. Not a guess. Not a blood panel. A floor-to-ceiling internal snapshot.
Andrew Lacy built that machine, that company, and that moment. He just didn't start in healthcare.
Lacy grew up in Melbourne, Australia, earned a law degree and an economics degree from the University of Melbourne, then completed an MBA from Stanford. His career trajectory was respectable, even predictable: management consulting at McKinsey, a stint in Madrid working on Disney's European strategy, then product and leadership roles at Lebara Limited. The kind of path that reads impressively on a résumé and leads nowhere particularly unusual.
Rollerblading past Yahoo and eBay on a Silicon Valley street in the late 1990s, Lacy got the itch. He was a consultant then - watching others build things. That image stayed with him through years of corporate life until he finally acted on it.
In 2007, just after Apple unveiled the iPhone, Lacy co-founded Tapulous in Palo Alto. The premise was simple: music games on a touchscreen. What happened next wasn't. Before Apple's official App Store existed, Tapulous had already distributed 10 million installs through an underground store they built themselves. Their flagship game, Tap Tap Revenge, eventually reached 35 million downloads. In July 2010, Walt Disney Company acquired Tapulous, and Lacy moved over to run mobile business development for Disney.
He didn't stay long. The itch returned. He moved to Paris, met his wife, and started teaching himself to code - frontend, backend, the whole stack. What began as personal curiosity accidentally became his second startup: Zap (later Zaptravel), a voice-activated travel search engine. He ran it from 2012 to 2016, exiting to Avara.