True North x Change Makers: Northern Star — Dr Edward Lynch

Most of us don’t think about our health until something goes wrong: a sudden pain, a frightening diagnosis, a call that changes everything. Yet for many people, that ‘sudden’ moment has been building quietly for 30 or 40 years.

Dr Edward Lynch, Founder of helfy®, saw that pattern unfold every day while working in intensive care and emergency departments across the North. Instead of accepting it as inevitable, he chose to build a business focused on preventing chronic disease before it takes hold.

Ed is one of the inspiring business leaders from True North featured in a special series produced in partnership with the Change Makers podcast. The conversations spotlight Northern Stars who are driving impact in their communities, nurturing future skills and backing bold ideas that make a difference.

He joined the podcast to share the story of why he stepped away from a traditional NHS career path to launch helfy®, how he’s scaling a longevity platform across the UK and why improving lifestyle health has become his lifelong mission.

Moving from treatment to prevention

helfy® started in 2022. I’d worked in the NHS for a few years at that point — in intensive care during COVID and emergency departments across the North.

I was seeing the same thing time and time again: people coming in with something acute like a heart attack or a stroke while the disease had been accumulating for over 30 or 40 years. It’s pernicious — building up quietly and then suddenly it’s there.

Patients would say to me, “why has this happened?” They didn’t want to live that way and I realised that nobody was really doing anything about it.

The NHS is set up to treat disease. While it’s tightly governed (and rightly so), that makes innovation difficult. Procurement is complex and each trust funds its own activity. Even when you can see a problem and think, “can we just do this one thing?”, you’re often powerless to fix it.

At the same time, the health and wellbeing industry is meant to be creating good health — but in my view, it’s doing a bad job of it. People are sold supplements on Instagram that they shouldn’t be taking. Fundamentally, people want to be healthy, they just don’t know what to do.

So, I thought, “we’ve got to do something about this”.

helfy® is essentially longevity medicine. We work one-to-one with people to improve their overall lifestyle, prevent chronic disease and optimise their health. It’s about increasing health and life span.

Our route to market is through the corporate world. Businesses pay for private medical support and that funds our activity in the workplace. We do the diagnostics and the delivery and everything is tracked through our longevity platform that we’ve built to be the most sophisticated in the UK.

Taking the risk

There was huge backlash when I started. Friends and family asked me what I was doing. Medicine is usually a full life decision: you stay in your lane, you go into a training programme and you become a normal doctor.

My mum especially wanted stability. I didn’t pay myself for nearly five years while the idea was forming and then launching. There was real risk. At the beginning, I didn’t even think about it. I just thought, “let’s go”.

There have been tough times like financially sticky situations and legal challenges. I’ve had to learn very quickly about contracts, hiring and how to protect the business.

Early on, I hired based on skill. I wouldn’t do that now. Now I hire based on energy and tenacity. If someone comes in with the right mindset and they’re willing to grind, they can learn anything.

When you start out, you don’t know anything. You’re expected to have a view on legal, HR, marketing and operations. Although you can read about it, until you’re in the thick of it, it’s all academic. Experience teaches you how to behave and make the right decisions at the right time.

While there are downs, when you land something big, you celebrate. It’s like scoring a goal. There aren’t many careers where you get that feeling.

Serendipity & scale

One of our biggest breakthroughs happened by accident. I was in a coffee shop and someone introduced me to a contact at CBRE. They manage buildings and rent offices to other businesses and were trying to improve the health and wellbeing of their buildings. Someone said, “you should speak to Ed”.

We met. They loved what we were doing and asked us to trial something. The thing they asked us to try has now become the cornerstone of our corporate offer. In many ways, they shaped the product.

There’s always luck involved but you make your own luck. We’d done years of groundwork to be ready for that moment and we’ll always grab an opportunity if it’s aligned with our ethos.

We’re now servicing most of the UK. The tech we’ve built is foundational and scalable. Whether we have ten clients or a million, it’s the same software.

I do want to take it global. It might sound unrealistic but I think that’s true for most founders. Within five years, there’s no reason why we couldn’t expand across Europe and beyond. Tech has no borders.

A Northern mission

We’re based in the Liverpool City Region and that matters to me. I want to help the people here. 

We have a poorer population and significant health challenges. There’s even variation in blood test reference ranges depending on where you are in the country because baseline health differs. That tells you everything.

There’s a real north–south divide. London has more funding and more infrastructure. In the UK, we’re at a disadvantage — particularly outside London — but I think that there's huge opportunity here. There’s more funding coming into our region now and more collaboration between NHS trusts and academia to try to solve health issues locally.

No blueprint — just belief

We’ve had a lot of mentorship. Some of it has been incredible, some of it hasn’t been helpful at all. The reality is that not many people have built and scaled a tech-enabled longevity company in our niche so there isn’t a clear blueprint to follow.

We’re now working closely with an organisation that focuses purely on mentorship and consulting for businesses and they’ve been incredible.

There’s a concept called the triple chasm — stages where most businesses fail. If you can get through the second chasm, that’s where businesses tend to scale significantly. We’re building towards that.

We won’t stop. We’ll keep going until we’ve improved the health of every individual we can get in front of. If we can optimise health — not just treat disease — that’s the goal.

Ultimately, I want the business to travel  and help as many people as we can along the way.

Reflections for purpose-driven leaders

• Act when you see a problem repeated again and again — don’t assume someone else will fix it.
• Be prepared for backlash — risk and instability are part of building something new.
• Hire for energy and tenacity — skills can be learned.

• Think globally from day one — especially if you’re building tech.

   

Shape what’s next for the North

Ed is just one of the members of True North who want to build something better — together. 

If you’re committed to supporting the future of the North, join our growing collaborative network of purpose‑driven leaders.