In late 2016, Hugh Harvey was working as a consultant doctor in the UK’s National Health Service. Harvey had dabbled in machine learning while doing a research degree, and had seen the potential for artificial intelligence to revolutionize health care. But he felt strongly that the introduction of AI into medicine was not going to come from within the NHS—it was going to come from industry. So when an opportunity opened up at a buzzy new health-tech startup, Babylon Health, he applied.
Founded in London in 2013 by Ali Parsa, a British-Iranian ex-banker, Babylon had a lofty goal: It wanted to do with health care what Google did with information; that is, make it freely and easily available to everyone. By the time Harvey joined the company in 2016, it was already picking up tens of millions in venture capital funding—even though at that point, all it had built was an app that let patients have video calls with their doctors. Helpful, yes, but not exactly revolutionary. The company’s value was in its grand ambition to add on an AI-powered symptom checker, which would speed up—or even automate—diagnoses.
Accustomed to the frugal conditions of the perpetually cash-strapped NHS, Harvey says he was taken in by the lavish setup: laptop waiting for him on his desk, fancy office in upmarket South Kensington, free office beers and pizzas at lunch. But soon, Harvey got to take a peek at the software that was behind all the excitement. What he was shown was a bunch of Excel spreadsheets containing clinical decision pathways written by junior doctors at the company. They had essentially divided the body up into different parts, and depending on which part of the body the user clicked on, the app would follow what they called “clinical flows,” or decision trees. “I was like, well, this isn’t really artificial intelligence,” Harvey recalls thinking.
But over the next few years, the hype around Babylon just kept growing. It picked up contracts with the NHS and British health insurance providers. Chinese tech giant Tencent signed a deal to offer services through WeChat. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested $550 million. By the time it went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021, Babylon was valued at $4.2 billion. But the wheels were already coming off. The company’s losses were mounting as it spent big to chase growth. Its share price quickly went into free fall. In mid-August this year, after a rescue deal fell apart, it was announced that the UK side of the business was going into administration—a process similar to bankruptcy protection in the US. The company shuttered its US headquarters, laid off scores of employees, and filed for bankruptcy there, too.
WIRED spoke to three former employees at Babylon Health to uncover what went so wrong for the darling of the “digital-first” health-tech landscape. What they say about the company’s collapse—at a moment when VC interest in AI and health care is at a fever pitch—is a warning about the dangers of backing hype over delivery.
Neither Parsa nor Babylon Health responded to multiple requests for comment.