Olympian Andrew Steele’s Stride raises £4.6M for preventive health

Andrew Steele, the Olympic medallist behind Stride, has raised £4.6 million in seed funding for a preventive health business that wants to make testing feel a lot less clinical and a lot more useful. The round includes Arāya Ventures, Better Ventures, Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures, Innovate UK, an investor from the a16z Scout Fund, and several angels.

Stride launched in 2023 and sells a membership built around DNA, blood and gut testing, plus personalised insights. Members can also book individual consultations with a dietitian. The company says its kits ship from a UK laboratory to customers around the world, and it plans to expand Stride One internationally by the end of 2026.

The money will support two specific projects. One is a multiomic approach to measuring biological age. The other is an AI health copilot designed to pull together lab results, wearable data and health records. Innovate UK’s backing is being used on both.

Steele’s pitch is rooted in a long arc from elite sport to consumer health. In 2008, he finished fourth in the 4x400m relay at the Beijing Olympics, only to later receive bronze after anti-doping retests changed the result. Before Stride, he founded DNAfit, which Prenetics bought in April 2018; Steele then served as chief product officer for EMEA until leaving in January 2023.

Stride is entering a crowded market with far bigger cheques flying around elsewhere. Function Health has raised $450 million in non-dilutive growth financing, Superpower closed a $30 million Series A, and Neko Health raised $700 million in a Series C. In the UK and Europe, the numbers are smaller, but the logic is the same: keep people engaged after the novelty wears off, or the nice health dashboard becomes expensive wallpaper.