Scaling health tech: 6 lessons from launching a second brand

When I launched 32Co in 2022, the company was built around two convictions. First, that technology, like AI, was going to fundamentally reshape how medical treatments are delivered. Second, that doctors and clinicians would still be the ones delivering them.

Our mission, then and now, has been to bridge that gap: giving primary care clinicians the technology, training, and oversight they need to offer specialist-level treatments at any given patient’s local practice, not just on Harley Street.

We started with orthodontics, helping patients access clear aligner treatment through their regular dentist. Today, 32Co is the top-rated premium aligner system in the UK, with 90% of the population living within 30 minutes of a trained specialist. So, by any measure, it worked.

And when we launched Aerox Health, our second specialist treatment vertical focused on sleep medicine, we were able to capitalise on 4 years of doing the hard yards to launch in months, not years.

And that decision has fundamentally changed how I think about scaling a health tech business in 2026.

Here’s a few of the key lessons I’ve learned in the process.

1. Identify the sleeping giants

We chose dental sleep medicine because it was literally a sleeping giant: 8 million people in the UK suffer from sleep apnoea, yet NHS provision is patchy and awareness of the very problem is low.

I learnt to not just look for a large market, but to look for an underpenetrated one. We found an army of dentists who already had the clinical capacity to help these patients but lacked the pathway to do it. True scale happens when you unlock existing resources rather than trying to build new ones from scratch.

2. Clinical rigour is your license to operate

The usual tech mantra is move fast and break things. But in health tech, if you break things, you lose lives or at least, you lose trust. Building that trust takes time, it’s nurtured through every successful clinical outcome.

And the best way to maintain clinical rigour is to prioritise it at every level, starting at the top.

For us that meant, setting the highest possible standard for clinical excellence at the top and committing ourselves to a culture that continued it.

It also meant accepting that we’d have to go slow to go fast in the early stages. In a world where everyone is vibe coding an app in hours, health tech is different. We spent years meticulously building a product that ensures clinical success every time (not 99% of the time), which is now much more scalable than if we’d take shortcuts early on.

Then there is setting clinical standards internally that obsesses about clinical outcomes. Before we hired a technical team, we partnered with Professor Ama Johal, a global authority in sleep medicine, to build our protocols.

When we went on to build out the rest of the sleep team, we focused on a mix of both technologists and clinicians to ensure every aspect of the product is easy to use and clinically rigorous. This ensured we weren’t simply commercialising an opportunity. It was essential to us that we were raising the national standard of care in parallel.

3. Build engines over products

The most valuable thing we built at 32Co wasn’t an orthodontics app. We built a clinical engine and internal infrastructure that’s capable of training, providing AI oversight, and managing logistics for just about any specialist treatment.

With the engine in place, every new product launch becomes a matter of changing a few inputs vs. starting from scratch

If you build your first product too rigidly, you’ll have to rebuild everything for your second. Because we treated 32Co as an operating system, launching sleep medicine became just another module update, requiring far less input from our end.

4. Know when a second brand is mandatory

One of the hardest decisions was realising that ‘32Co Sleep’, as a brand, wouldn’t work. The patient seeking a straighter smile has a completely different emotional profile than the person with a collapsing airway at night.

Although the challenge of sleep medicine is the same as orthodontics, i.e. not enough specialists providing treatments, the go-to-market is completely different. Aligner patients know there is a problem and a solution. People with sleep apnoea may not even know they have it.

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We built Aerox Health as a consumer-facing brand to speak specifically to sleep deprivation. It allowed us to generate direct demand while utilising the same trusted 32Co clinician network.

The process taught me that if you’ve built a completely new product for a completely new audience, it’s better to make the hard choice of launching a new brand than diluting the brand you’ve spent years building. Although it’s more work in the beginning, the ability to speak directly to your ICP with one message from one brand is a force multiplier.

5. Become the bottleneck then step aside

In the early days of a new vertical, your involvement as a founder is intense. I spent months in the weeds, making sure our ways of working, values, and culture of clinical rigour translated into our new space. I was able to see the vision and communicate, but that level of intensity isn’t sustainable.

Scaling requires a level of transition from execution to system design. For me that meant I had to empower a dedicated sleep team and step back. If you don’t delegate, you don’t scale, you just become the person holding two halves of a business that are both moving too slowly. But if you’ve properly laid the foundation, stepping aside becomes a much easier decision to make.

6. The power of the quiet launch

The urge to shout from the rooftops on day one is strong, but in healthcare, caution is king. We operated Aerox Health quietly for months, refining clinical workflows and ensuring patient satisfaction before we ever sent out a press release.

Once we were happy with the level we were at, we began reaching out to media to talk about our story.

If anything, a pilot is more than a technical test. I really believe it should be a key part of your commercial and marketing strategy. It allows you to build a national waiting list and control your momentum so that when you flip the switch, your infrastructure doesn’t crumble under the weight of your own success. That can be the difference between make or break as a health company.

Scaling with purpose

Healthcare is deeply personal. As we look toward our next specialist verticals, the goal remains the same: ensuring that the highest standard of care isn’t a luxury found in a few London postcodes, but a service available at every local practice.