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Health tech entrepreneur, Dana Allison has led a big, beautiful life.

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“I have had this amazing life, I won't lie,” she laughs. “And it's mostly because I'm the kind of person who says yes to opportunity, even if I have no idea how it's going to work out.”

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It’s an approach you’ll find in the origin stories of Australia’s most successful founders, and it’s taken Dana from medical school to humanitarian aid, a successful health tech exit and now Trova Health, a groundbreaking new startup on a mission to deliver scalable healthcare for all. 

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From micro to macro

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Dana began her entrepreneurial journey while working as a medical intern in a UNHCR refugee camp in Thailand. 

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“I was living overseas, and it was the first time where I knew no one and where I was faced with trauma every day,” she says. 

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The trauma was “way, way less than what the refugees were faced with, but we saw it and had so little power to change their circumstances, so it was very hard to manage emotionally.” 

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The lack of adequate mental health support for aid workers within the UN system was glaring. Even when therapists were available, they often lacked the cultural and linguistic understanding necessary to effectively assist aid workers from diverse backgrounds.

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At the same time, Dana’s focus shifted from one-on-one patient care to broader health solutions, such as designing quarantine protocols for cholera outbreaks. 

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“I started discovering that I wanted to work on big problems that would influence a lot of people more than I wanted to do one-to-one care,” she says.

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With scale of the impact becoming her new metric of success, Dana founded the Women's World Health Initiative, a not-for-profit in West Africa focused on using technology to deliver healthcare in remote and rural communities. 

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After six years, she pivoted to digital health with IM Your Doc, a HIPAA-compliant mobile app for telehealth and instant provider-patient communication which she built to profitability with almost 500 clinics and successfully exited. Both ventures prepared to build a platform in healthcare at scale. 

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That inkling she had working with the United Nations was a much larger problem. “I started seeing it repeated in different parts of the world by different types of people, where mental health care that was culturally and linguistically matched, was not available,” she says.  

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And of course, the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic only amplified these challenges, exposing that behavioural health services infrastructure was totally unequipped to meet the growing demand for mental healthcare.

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Despite there being over 20,000 mental health and wellness apps, it is still hard to easily access care around the world that takes into account culture and language.

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Dana immediately could see the need and opportunity. There are millions globally seeking care, providers ready to help, and trusted brands eager to scale to meet the demand. These are the ingredients for a powerful global marketplace. But it is too hard and too expensive for trusted direct to consumer mental health providers to expand beyond the US and into new markets. They need something to unlock it, to remove friction so companies can expand faster and cheaper.

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Enter Trova Health

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Trova is the connector, the key to unlocking global demand to local providers with trusted platforms. Trova is a plug and play platform and provider network that makes it possible for digital health companies to expand seamlessly and efficiently.

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With Trova’s local provider networks and a compliant care delivery platform, they enable quick market entry, connecting patients, providers, and brands with a single streamlined system. They reduce expansion costs, making global growth easier, faster, and finally possible.

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Think of it like a Shopify for mental health services, providing the tools that smooth out the friction points so they can sell into new locations. 

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After a successful launch in South Africa and expansion to three additional countries, Trova have just launched in Brazil, which is a massive commercialisation market that is ready to be tapped by trusted brands to meet the burgeoning demand, and supply of providers.

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Impressively, this expansion has been entirely bootstrapped. But when asked about her most significant achievement, Dana cites the team behind Trova, who are as “audacious” and driven as she is. 

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“It could be massive. A $105 billion dollar market available to these companies, so you have to have the right team to succeed,” she says. 

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Along with Dana’s experience, co-founder and CTO Balaji Varanasi is a 25-year health software and architecture veteran with lived experience taking legacy systems international. He brings his deep SME  to Trova alongside clinical lead Dr Truida Botha, who has a PhD in cross-border healthcare. 

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Scaling up

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Team Trova is now one of 11 companies in the Winter 24 Startmate Accelerator cohort, a group of Australia’s most ambitious early-stage companies. The program has provided Dana and her team with invaluable guidance and a powerful launchpad into the Australian startup ecosystem.

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“The amazing mentors and advisors that are related to Startmate have been enormous supports… it truly has accelerated Trova faster than I ever thought we could go, and I didn’t think we could go any faster,” she says. 

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The results seem pretty clear: during the program Trova has almost tripled their revenue in a short 10 week period and is poised for a $1.8 million AUD fundraising round to accelerate their growth..

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Looking forward

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While mental health is the current focus, Dana says Trova’s infrastructure could one day scale across any healthcare vertical. 

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“We are ultimately building an infrastructure that is agile across borders and has this provider network that can meet linguistic and cultural needs, whether in-country or even across borders,” she says. 

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“And if we pull that off, then there's all sorts of verticals where healthcare no longer needs to be limited by location.”

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