Emerald product and website

Emerald is a preventive health startup working on longevity: you track 115+ biomarkers, see your biological age and your Emerald Score, and can ask certified GPs what any of it means. When I joined there was an idea and a lot of conviction, but no product, no interface, no users. I designed the whole thing from a blank canvas: the product, the flows, the visual language.

The heart of Emerald is a dashboard that sums up your health. The tension the whole way through: make medical data feel simple without ever making it wrong. On it:

• The Emerald Score, one number for overall health and forecasted longevity, fed by lab results, medical history, exercise and family background
• Biological Age, your body’s age next to your passport’s, so you can see whether you’re ageing ahead of the calendar or behind it
• A few plain-language takeaways, each with something you can actually do about it
• Deeper reports, one per health area, for when you want the detail
• And a Sources section with tooltips and links, for the sceptics and the curious

It took a lot of rounds: wireframes and prototypes passed between me, the CEO, the CMO, the developers and the medical team. The rule we kept coming back to was “answer first, evidence one tap away”, so a worried person gets the summary and a sceptical one can keep digging.

Health data lives everywhere: a ring, a watch, a folder of lab PDFs buried somewhere in email. Emerald had to be the one place it all lands, without scaring off someone on day one. So you can connect your wearables and see when they last synced, upload old reports and have them filed properly, and always tell what arrived when. I sat with the medical experts and the developers to map every data flow and state, because nothing erodes trust faster than wondering whether a connection actually worked.

Knowledge Centre and interactive tools

Biomarkers are intimidating to read about, let alone act on. The Knowledge Centre has 110+ articles, every one reviewed by clinicians but written like a person talking, plus calculators that turn your lab numbers into things you can use: risk scores, daily targets. All of it went through the medical team, then through round after round of visual tweaks, so it works whether you read health content every day or never.

GP access

You can also message certified GPs inside Emerald, share files with them, and get advice that refers to your own numbers. I wanted the chat to feel like part of the product rather than a bolted-on widget, so the conversation history stays in reach and the doctor’s guidance sits right next to the data it’s about.

The obvious move with 115+ biomarkers is to put them all on screen. I traded completeness for clarity: the dashboard leads with one score and a biological age, and keeps the full data one tap below for the people who want it. The hard line was doing that without making the medicine wrong, so every simplified number stays sourced and the medical team signed off on each claim. A cleaner screen a clinician could not stand behind would have been worthless.

The product has grown up in public since this work. Emerald came out of stealth with a team of ex-Revolut and NHS people and £625K from European founders, operators and professional athletes, then closed a $2M pre-seed led by Boost Capital Partners. Today it is a CQC-registered medical provider, offering that 115-biomarker Baseline test at more than 50 locations across the UK, with GP-led diagnosis and prescriptions on top of the dashboard this case study describes.

The space around it kept pace. The TechCrunch coverage of longevity startups tracks the funding flowing into preventive health, and Rock Health’s research follows how many people now use wearables and digital health tools as a matter of course.

The design bet, one clear score before the detail, has evidence behind it too. npj Digital Medicine publishes the peer-reviewed work on wearables and digital biomarkers that a platform like this sits on, and Oura’s own write-up of its readiness score shows the same pattern winning in consumer health: turn the biomarkers into one answer, keep the lab report one tap below.