Sasha spent her career building regulated consumer products in fintech, financial crime systems at Tide, credit products used by millions at Pave, before moving into the part of healthcare almost nobody builds for. Paediatrics is widely treated as too high-risk for remote care, so children are defaulted to face-to-face. Sasha and her co-founder Abhi, an NHS GP and 3rd time founder, think that's backwards. The risk comes from generalism, and a service designed entirely around children is safer, not riskier. Joey is the UK's only regulated digital paediatric service, giving parents access to paediatric specialists over WhatsApp - the thing that should exist between Googling symptoms at 2am and sitting in A&E.
Fresh off a $1.4M pre-seed, we spoke to Sasha about fundraising through a market that was repricing itself mid-raise, why she'd rather count the opportunities in front of her than the ones she'll never see, and Joey's ambition to build something genuinely difficult to dismiss.
FC: Could you summarise your professional background and introduce your company?
Sasha: I love to say I'm a generalist, but I'm really a product and ops person who loves the challenge of building regulated products that people actually love using. I've spent my career building and scaling fintech in London. At Tide, the neo-bank for businesses, I worked on products ranging from financial crime, including identifying a human trafficking ring, to internal products to customer-facing features. Then at Pave, a financial inclusion company, I was Head of Product building credit products that millions of people used.
I've now jumped over from fintech to healthtech since meeting my co-founder Abhi and hearing about his experiences in the NHS. I think healthtech and fintech have so many similarities - the way consumers think about them, both being regulated, and healthtech in London today looks a lot like fintech eight years ago. Paediatrics is the same problem, with higher stakes, and regulation isn’t an obstacle to tolerate, it’s the moat I know how to build.
Joey began because of Abhi’s experience as a GP in the NHS and that healthcare just wasn’t working for children.
Joey is the UK's only regulated digital paediatric service. Parents message us on WhatsApp and speak to paediatric specialists who can diagnose, prescribe and advise - the thing that should exist between Googling symptoms at 2am and sitting in A&E when you don’t need to be there.
FC: What fundraising challenges have you faced, and how did you navigate them?
Sasha: So many! Though a few particularly stand out.
One of my biggest frustrations with the industry is that advice is given as if it’s universal but it rarely transfers between companies, founders, industries, and so much more. Other founders really do mean well and they want you to avoid the issues they had - they look back at what worked for them, or what they think would have made things better, and offer it as a rule. Go in with a strategy, time-box the process to eight weeks, start with the investors you care less about so you can practise your story on them. As two first-time founders, we didn’t have the relationships to dictate investor calendars, and we weren’t convinced there were investors we cared less about anyway.
What worked for us was deciding to run our own process in ways that played to our own strengths, and really unpicking the advice to figure out what actually applied to our situation.
The second was that the market was changing so much mid-fundraise. We raised while investors were still working out what AI meant for team size and capital efficiency, and that uncertainty showed up as inconsistent feedback.
The only way we could progress on closing our round was to stop optimising for feedback, and get clearer on our own thesis.
And lastly, it’s can be such a lonely experience. The founders who are raising at the same time are incredibly busy, so there is little opportunity to talk openly and share the hard parts. And then out the end of it, everyone shares their successes. What honestly got us through was Abhi and I having each other, I genuinely don’t know how solo founders do it.
Now that we’re out the other side, having raised $1.4M, the challenges really shaped us into the founders we are today - with better judgement and more conviction.
FC: Are there any barriers you have faced as a female founder?
Sasha: I have a complicated relationship with the label female founder.
Personally, I haven’t felt that people in the rooms I entered were treating me differently because of my gender. However, I am sure there are rooms and conversations that may not have been accessible to me, or to others, because of some combination of race, gender and the industry’s perception of what a successful founder looks like.
I also find that a lot of the experience around female founders, particularly in fundraising, has felt quite surface-level. There can be a lot of conversation about supporting female founders without much meaningful action behind it.
That being said, there are some great communities that I can access as a female founder, like Female Founders Rise and Female Foundry - the rooms I want to be in, where the conversations are honest, vulnerable and genuinely helpful.
I’m so aware that there are genuine structural barriers, and those should be recognised, but I do not want the identity of being a female founder to become the main story for me or the company. I would much rather focus on what we’re building and the opportunities in front of my than the ones I’ll never be able to count.
FC: What have you learnt from building Joey and working within paediatric healthcare?
Sasha: The first thing we realised is that paediatrics is narrow in a way adult medicine simply is not. The overwhelming majority of routine childhood presentations collapse into a small number of pathways, which means the space lends itself far better to thoughtful automation than most of medicine does.
That leads to what is really our contrarian bet. That the industry avoids paediatrics because it is seen as high-risk, so children get directed towards face-to-face care by default. But risk comes from generalism. By specialising, you can design every protocol, build every escalation threshold, hire every clinician and there make every decision specific to children’s health. So the risk goes down rather than up.
The third thing is that the bottleneck was never clinical knowledge. It is routing and availability. Families often do not know which specialist they need, and even when they do, that expertise is not readily available. That is a technology problem, not a medicine problem.
Putting these three learnings together gives us something we’re very excited about - the expertise of the incredible paediatric clinicians we work with, made available to almost any family at a fraction of the current cost. Some of what we are building would require medical device registration before it can be made publicly available, and one of our grants exists to help us work through exactly that pathway. As we have started building it, we have realised the idea is completely possible.
FC: How has your previous startup experience helped you as a founder?
Sasha: Having only worked in start ups was a great bank of experience, particularly that the mechanics of an early-stage company are not new to me. I have seen them from inside other early-stage businesses, so the learning curve is largely in paediatrics and in healthtech.
Abhi came into the startup world from medicine, so he’s had a completely different learning curve. He brings the clinical expertise and first-hand experience of the problems families and clinicians face. I have spent my career building regulated consumer products and know how to get from ambiguity to something shippable. We have this incredible complementarity, and neither of us could build Joey alone, or would even want to!
FC: What advice would you give to aspiring female founders?
Sasha: Be careful about treating advice as universal.
People will often give you advice based on the path that worked or what they think would have for them. Listen to it, but recognise that it may not fit your company, your fundraising process, your circumstances or maybe even just you and your personality.
You have to develop your own judgement about what is useful.
I would also say that building a company is genuinely fun, even when it is difficult. Find people to work with that make it fun. A value that I hold incredibly dear is to take your work seriously without taking yourself too seriously.
Lastly, have opinions, challenge yourself and be brave. And focus on creating a business that is genuinely difficult to dismiss.
FC: What is next for Joey?
Sasha: Ultimately we want to bring incredible paediatric expertise to every family, to provide everyday specialist care.
We’re building toward a product that can handle routine paediatric care autonomously - not just triage, actual care and resolution. We won an Innovate UK grant to work through what would actually make this a medical device, because really that’s the difference between service and infrastructure. We’re growing the number of families using Joey now, because the product only gets there with really usage from real families.
What makes this so exciting is that we can see that it is possible, and now we are doing the work required to make it real.
Thank you to Sasha for contributing to Female Founder Friday and for sharing such an honest account of fundraising, founder identity and the work required to build safely in paediatric healthcare.
Joey’s commitment to making everyday specialist care accessible to every family offers a compelling glimpse of what thoughtful, regulated digital healthcare can achieve. We look forward to following Sasha, Abhi and the wider Joey team as they continue developing the technology and expertise required to transform how families access paediatric support.
To learn more about Sasha and Joey, visit the links below:
Website: askjoeynow.com
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sashanagarajah/
Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/askjoeynow/
Author: Jen Jeffries, Marketing Executive at FounderCatalyst
