Canadian healthtech integrates blood testing, wearable tech and clinician-led guidance to improve users’ healthspan.
Last week, Edmonton-based health tech company NiaHealth secured $5.75 million in seed funding to accelerate its mission to bring proactive, preventive healthcare to Canadians. The company has developed a tech-enabled platform that integrates wearables, clinical-grade testing and personalized guidance from human clinicians, to help users improve their health trajectories, with plans starting at just $299 a year.
With a focus on healthspan, NiaHealth’s approach aims to optimize long-term health outcomes rather than simply reacting to illness, leveraging digital tools designed to engage clients in sustained health behavior change. The company’s service involves comprehensive at-home health assessments, including blood and urine samples, reporting on up to 100 biomarkers, which are integrated with data from popular wearable devices. Each client also receives a virtual consultation with a clinician, who interprets results and develops a tailored action plan covering nutrition, supplements, sleep, exercise and other lifestyle factors.
The funding round, which brings the total raised by NiaHealth to more than $8 million, was led by Golden Ventures and supported by a host of angel investors, many of whom have personal experience with the platform.
Longevity.Technology: Until recently, the domain of personalized, preventive healthcare was dominated by high-end concierge and executive health clinics, often charging thousands of dollars per month for their services. However, the emergence of US players like Function and Superpower, and now NiaHealth in Canada, is reflective of a growth in tech-enabled companies offering seemingly comparable services at much lower price points. We sat down with NiaHealth founder and CEO Sameer Dhar to find out more about what’s driving the democratization of proactive healthcare.
Prior to founding NiaHealth, Dhar built and sold a company providing a sensing solution for incontinence management in nursing homes – an experience that shaped his future direction.
“I lived in nursing homes for a year across three different North American facilities,” he says. “My motivation for building NiaHealth came from a desire to keep people healthy for as long as possible – ideally so they never need to enter a nursing home at all. My goal is to make proactive health management become a ubiquitous concept, with millions of people actively engaged in their own health.”
‘Strip away the excess’
The notion of private, pay-as-you-go healthcare – even in countries with single-payer, publicly funded systems like Canada – has existed for decades.
“We didn’t set out specifically to be compared to those services,” says Dhar. “Instead, what we discovered as we built NiaHealth from the ground up was that we could take the most essential elements of executive health care, deliver them in a far more effective and convenient way, and offer them at a much more affordable price. We realized that by stripping away excess and focusing on what truly matters, we could offer a service at a tenth of the cost – making it dramatically more accessible.”
All of NiaHealth’s assessments begin with a blood test, looking at biomarkers covering key health domains such as cardiovascular, metabolic, kidney, liver, thyroid function and nutrient levels, with results interpreted using up-to-date, evidence-based reference ranges tailored to each client’s healthspan and longevity goals.
“Everyone agrees that blood analysis is the foundation of a quality proactive health checkup,” says Dhar. “We’ve also expanded our offerings to include other options like VO2 max testing, DEXA scans, and gut microbiome analysis, and we’ve developed our own CGM solution, which allows us to combine blood glucose data with all our other metrics and provide detailed, actionable nutrition recommendations.”
Clients receive their results via an interactive digital dashboard, which tracks trends over time and provides personalized insights and actionable recommendations on lifestyle, nutrition, sleep and fitness. The platform allows users to upload past or future lab results for ongoing monitoring and comparison.
Addressing behavior change
Dhar acknowledges that getting people to change their lifestyle is one of the biggest challenges facing the longevity field.
“Lifestyle is 90% of the battle, and the real challenge lies in driving sustained behavior change – most people still need guidance and encouragement to follow through with recommendations,” he says. “I sometimes hear people ask why they should invest in this if, at the end of the day, the advice is just to eat better, sleep more, and exercise. That’s like telling a business not to track operating metrics because all you need is to maximize revenue and minimize expenses – it’s absurd. Yet, for our health, we seem to forget that tracking, measuring, and optimizing is just as crucial.”
NiaHealth believes strongly in the role of clinicians in the proactive healthcare revolution, particularly when it comes to behavior change. After the initial assessment, the company offers a 30-minute virtual consultation with a clinician to review findings and create a customized action plan, with ongoing support including six-month follow-ups to ensure accountability and progress.
“Many companies globally are moving away from clinician involvement because it’s hard to scale, but our vision insists clinicians remain a meaningful part of the system,” says Dhar. “We still keep clinicians in the loop – not just to analyze your results – we think it’s important to have them interpret findings and personalize care. Particularly for older adults, a clinician consultation can be transformational, helping motivate and guide people through recommended changes, and ensuring any necessary medical follow-up is arranged.”
The company operates using a nurse practitioner–driven model. In Canada, nurse practitioners are an emerging group helping address the shortage of clinicians supporting primary care. A nurse practitioner is a registered nurse with advanced education and training who can diagnose and treat illnesses, order tests, prescribe medications and manage a patient’s overall care.
“Nurse practitioners have scopes of practice comparable to family physicians – they deliver an exceptional experience,” says Dhar. “They combine medical expertise, holistic empathy, and coaching skills that make a real difference. We’ve seen this repeatedly and feel nurse practitioners are coming into their own as key clinical operators in Canada.”
Shift to proactive healthcare ‘inevitable’
While it’s still early days for the company, Dhar says NiaHealth has already produced data, which demonstrates that its approach is providing value to its clients.
“We’ve found that 90% of people discover some previously unknown health risk, with 25–30% flagged for prediabetes or diabetes, and 20% for genetic cardiovascular risk,” he says. “The next step is to see if people actually act on our recommendations, and whether this is reflected in their biomarkers. Our sample size is still small, but among the cohorts who return after a year, compliance rates are encouraging – 60–70% follow our recommendations.”
NiaHealth’s first major milestone is to have had 100,000 biomarker tests completed in Canada with its proactive health offering.
“That’s our North Star at the moment,” says Dar. “Beyond that, we aim to get other payers – like insurers and government – on board by continuously building evidence that we’re reducing risks for conditions like diabetes and cardiovascular disease. With strong outcomes, insurers and governments will find it compelling to fund broader access. It’s our duty to contribute to the evidence base so we can move the whole field forward.”
According to Dhar, the real breakthrough will come when proactive health is included in insurance plans alongside things like massage, chiropractors and physiotherapy.
“If those things are covered, why not evidence-based preventive health? It just makes sense to me that’s where the world will go,” he says. “How do we get there? By building outcome-based evidence. The more companies operating in this space, the more evidence we generate, and the more likely insurers are to cover it. Once insurers are on board and the evidence base is there, governments will have to follow – simply because, long-term, it’s the most cost-effective solution. To me, this stepwise evolution is inevitable.”
Photographs courtesy of NiaHealth
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