Case 02 · Zero-to-one · Seqster
Zero to $12M.
First design hire. Built the product and the pitch that made a health-data platform investable.
Seqster health data platform · five shipped screens
Watchlist · Records · Timeline · Integrated view · DNA
Zero to one · four years at Seqster
First design hire → platform → capital → partnerships
First design hire
Blank canvas: no product, no design practice, a hard problem — fragmented EHRs.
Custom design system
Built from scratch as a white-label framework — partners could put their own theme over it.
Platform launch
One place for a person's whole health picture.
$12M Series A
Design central to the raise — the product was the pitch.
Partnerships won
American Heart Association · Takeda · 23andMe — design quality did the convincing.
2017
2021
Industry awards
Healthcare startup circles · unconfirmed, not pinned to a date.
From nothing to a platform that raised capital and won national partners — with design as the engine, not the decoration.
No product, no design function, no category language.
Health records that refused to talk to each other — and a company that had to explain why that mattered before it could sell anything.
Every silo: its own format, its own portal, its own login. Eight systems, eight versions of the truth, and no one sees the whole person.
One patient, eight versions of the truth
The "before" state · silo set illustrative
The patient
Design system plates · colour, type scale, components, spacing, radius. Shown in original colour — the palette is the specimen.
Built the system before the screens.
White-label by design: partners theme their own brand over our framework, so one system serves every deployment. Traded early velocity for a demo that never broke in front of a partner.
Outcome & reflection
$12M raised, with the platform central to the round. I would have hired a second designer six months earlier — the system held, but I was the bottleneck.