HealthMatch CEO Manuri Gunawardena’s first female role model was her mother. “I had immigrant parents, my mum was very determined and motivated. I saw her drive and naturally, it’s something I've looked up to,” she says...

Then, there was the VP of IP and litigation at Google, who she met by chance at a party in San Francisco. They got talking, and she ended up being one of HealthMatch’s angel investor. And of course, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s daughter Lucy Turnbull, who is an investor in the company. “If you can network well and get in front of the right people, there are plenty of people that are out there happy to help out. Whether it be investors or advisors, I had a really great set of them at the start of the journey that helped,” says Gunawardena. What is HealthMatch’s mission? The company is driven to accelerate medical research, allowing for faster and more efficient access to life-changing medication. 120,000 patients have created profiles on HealthMatch and 11,000 people have been in clinical trials in just two years. The company is growing – and fast. 

On the topic of female role models, there’s also Madame Clicquot, arguably the first female entrepreneur, and a great inspiration to Gunawardena. Which is why winning the 2021 Veuve Clicquot Bold Future Award was so meaningful for this dynamic entrepreneur. “It was very unexpected and very exciting, especially being part of celebrating women in entrepreneurship and women who have started businesses,” she says. 

Madame Clicquot met every challenge in her life boldly. How does Gunawardena approach her own life boldly? “I generally tend to be more open to taking risks. I'm open to opportunity and knowing that taking risks is how you really unlock impact and opportunity. That's how I approach life as well as building a company.”

Here, we speak to about her incredible career journey, which has taken from straight from university to becoming the CEO of a fast-growing start-up…

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Listen to our episode of the Sisterhood Works Podcast with Manuri here.

Manuri Gunawardena

I want to start at the beginning, take us back to what you were like at school and were you a determined child?

I don't think I was that determined. I was curious and inquisitive. The turning point was in late primary school. I read a biography on a neurosurgeon and thought, this is a cool job. I really want to do this. 

You were awarded with the 2021 Veuve Clicquot Bold Future Award. And you’ve said that you share “Madame Clicquot's, stubbornness in her pursuit of success." What drives you and keeps you motivated?

I have to boil it down to the role models I had as a kid. I had immigrant parents, my mum was very determined and motivated. I saw her drive and naturally, it’s something I've looked up to. In anything I do now, I have this sense of wanting to finish it or wanting to see it through. 

How did it feel to win the 2021 Veuve Clicquot Bold Future Award?

It was very unexpected and very exciting, especially being part of celebrating women in entrepreneurship and women who have started businesses. It was nice to take a pause and be recognised and be amongst finalists who are doing really amazing work across different fields. It was great to see that there's a platform to celebrate women in entrepreneurship.

You had planned on becoming a surgeon when you began your tertiary education but changed your mind once you realised the lack of access that sick patients were given to potentially lifesaving clinical trials. How did this impact you as a person and where did the idea for your company begin?

I was working in a lab which was looking at brain cancer. We were working on some brain cancer trials at the time, trying to find patients. The struggle was the difficulty in accessing patients, despite the fact that this was a disease that had no treatment, and people were willing to travel all over the world. It was here I first saw the disconnect. The thing that really hit me was we’re doing all this amazing research and trying to find cures and treatment, and there’s incredible R&D that’s happening. Then we get to the lab or a clinical trial and try to get these treatments to market and there are all these unnecessary inefficiencies that exist. There was a moment where I thought, we're never going to make progress in brain cancer. We're never going to be able to deliver new treatments to patients. If these inefficiencies continue to be, and things continue to be done the same way that they have for the last 30 or 50 years, we won’t make progress. There's always a lot of talk of innovation in this space and it’s slow because you're working with large companies, but that was the turning point to go well, if you're going to make an impact, there's an opportunity here to do something about it.

You took your idea to TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield Australia and won your pitch. Tell me what makes a good pitch and how did you prepare for it?

Looking back, I didn't know too much about startups and pitches and the way they're structured them. What really worked was if you understand the problem you're solving and you're able to really share the story and take people on the journey of what is it that you're solving. Why is it important? Being able to story tell well helps in pitching. As does getting people to buy into your mission and the journey that you want to take them on.

You went from university to the CEO of a startup. What have you learned about being a CEO?

I've learned that there's just no playbook or guide in terms of how to do it. Being a CEO of a startup is one of those roles that is constantly changing. What I was doing when we were a team of five people is very different to things that I do now as a team of 30 plus almost 40 people. You're constantly learning, so being open to learning and adapting and your role changing a lot is really important. You learn a lot about people management and skills that you don't necessarily get from doing a degree or at university.

Madame Clicquot was arguably the first female entrepreneur and at the Veuve Clicquot's Bold Woman Awards, we learned that the number of women aspiring to become entrepreneurs has jumped from 39% to 44%. Why do you think this is?

In recent years there have been more role models that are actively out there and examples of female founders that are doing and working in various fields, whether it be in tech, other STEM areas, taking bold bets. It shows women who want to be founders that the opportunity is there and there are more and more examples of people doing it.

How would you describe your leadership style?

I didn't come from a world of having even worked in a real job, it was the university straight into this. I had a blank canvas to begin with and there were no real rules that I followed. My style of leadership is bringing people along the journey, sharing the context of what we're doing. Making sure that when we hire people to join the HealthMatch team, they're super aligned to our mission and our values. It's really sharing the life and the vision with everyone so that you hire talented people that can go execute on that.

I'm fairly hands off in the sense of getting into the detail of directing people. If you hire really smart people who know, the job that they've got at hand, and you can give them a really clear picture of where to go, things generally get done well. My style is a little bit less in the weeds with people.

Tell me about the kind of office culture that you have created…

Our office is a really fun, energising space. What we wanted to do was bring our brand to life in our office. HealthMatch is a very patient facing brand, we're trying to make healthcare more consumer and more approachable and less sterile and scary. You can see that through the office. There's a lot of bright colours and really fun energy through the office. The team is very close and we love sharing wins and getting together as a team to discuss our goals and stuff. We've got really great breakout spaces, purple beer taps and cold brew taps which are a really great hit with the team. Our space is a place to collaborate and get people energised around the mission.

120,000 patients have created profiles on HealthMatch and 11,000 people have been in clinical trials in just two years. Tell me about how you've navigated such incredible growth, and did you ever imagine these numbers?

We've always had a really big vision and goal around making HealthMatch a global company, but the reality of seeing the user growth and the patients is another thing when you see it in person. When we launched in 2019, we used to get excited about one match to a trial and having a hundred new users join in a week, but seeing the volumes that we're having now is just incredible. I'm really excited to see how HealthMatch grows globally as we expand.

You talk about the future of medicine being patient centric. Can you explain what this looks like?

It means that patients drive their healthcare outcomes more. That patients know what options are out there, they're the ones selecting those options, or at least knowing what the options are so they can select them. With a clinician, it's about patients owning their data so that they can utilise that in the best way that they want. There’s a real push around these trends and patients wanting to have more control around the options that they have in health.

Madame Clicquot met every challenge in her life boldly. How would you say you approach your own life boldly?

I generally tend to be more open to taking risks. I'm open to opportunity and knowing that taking risks is how you really unlock impact and opportunity. That's how I approach life as well as building a company.

You've said that you have been quite fortunate to avoid a lot of the ageism criticism that you think other young businesswomen face. Why do you think this is?

It’s my perception of it. Perhaps it may happen more subtly, but I tend to not really get caught up in being a female founder. I just go out there and try and do things and avoid thinking too much about any criticism or perceptions that might be there. There are obviously the natural obstacles that you'll come up against - people that will have outdated views on who should be a leader or women and certain age groups. I think not letting it get to you is probably the best way to keep powering ahead. 

Last year, your company raised $18 million. Talk to me about what raising that capital means for you and HealthMatch…

Every time you raise capital, it just gives you the opportunity to double down on growth, in what you're doing. For us at Series B, that was about continuing to build out our products, double down on growth and start to expand more globally. It gives you the ability to pull in talent and resources. For us, we're looking at a US launch later this year and continuing to double that engineering team and our product team so we can build on what we're already delivering for patients.

Once you have VC funding, it adds a whole other level of complexity to a company. How have you navigated this?

After you’ve raised, there’s a lot of excitement and then there’s a realisation of, wow, now there's this huge responsibility and you've got to deliver on everything that you said you were going to deliver on. With VC funding, it comes with expectations and milestones that you need to hit and huge responsibility. Everyone that is hired in HealthMatch always feels responsibility around making sure that the company is successful, and we continue to scale. It puts a level of stress on you, but at the same time it's opportunity. I’m very grateful to have that opportunity to be able to build on the mission that we have.

When you walk into investor meetings, what gives you confidence?

Over the last probably three capital raises I've developed and changed my approach to it. What really gives you confidence is knowing that you've got a product, you've got users, you've got something that's valuable and investors want to be part of that. Just as much as you're pitching to investors, they're also wanting to be part of the journey that you're building. Seeing the results and the outcomes to date helps sell that journey, and getting people to buy into the future of what your company could look like.

As you continue to have these meetings, take the feedback and those hard questions and build them into your pitch. By the time you get to your last meetings, your pitch may have changed and the angle of the conversation may be different. Every time I've pitched to VCs before, the first pitch and the last pitch are all very different. Or they have different elements because I've learned what investors might be looking for and the questions that commonly keep coming up. 

Lucy Turnbull is one of your investors, joining HealthMatch as an advisor, tell me about some of the women who have helped guide you through your entrepreneurial journey…

I've been really fortunate to have some great female role models throughout the journey with HealthMatch. It's fantastic having Lucy on board. She brings great insight into the biotech space, having been a chairman of a prominent Australian biotech company and really understanding the healthcare landscape. Another example of a great mentor is another investor who I met in San Francisco, she's the VP of IP and litigation at Google. I just happened to meet her at a party in San Francisco, we spoke about HealthMatch, and she ended up being an angel investor and has given me some really great insights into being a female in such a high-powered position. 

I remember her saying previous to Google, she worked in the pharma world and being female, people would just underestimate her. They'd drop their guard and say things in front of her, and that worked to her advantage because being underestimated helped her actually come in and really show people that, hey, she was playing on the same playing field as the male colleagues. She was a really inspiration person to have early on in the journey and show me that, there are actually advantages as well to being a female and you can use them to help navigate your way through a pretty male dominated world.

My angel round and seed round were really a whole bunch of incredibly networked individuals that I met through things like TechCrunch and being in San Francisco. If you can network well and get in front of the right people, there are plenty of people that are out there happy to help out. Whether it be investors or advisors, I had a really great set of them at the start of the journey that helped.