June 25, 2021
A British-Iranian entrepreneur who came to the UK as a teenage refugee is on track to become a billionaire from the listing of his business in the US.
Babylon Health, a London-headquartered healthcare technology business, announced June 3 that it would join New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange in a deal valuing the business at $4.2 billion.
Dr. Ali Parsa, Babylon’s founder, is set to reap a major windfall from the transaction thanks to his ownership of just over a half of Babylon’s shares.
“Frankly, you shouldn’t believe everything you read and it’s irrelevant – they’re clearly counting more than I am counting,” Dr. Parsa told Yahoo Finance UK. “But the reality is I have enough. Even before Babylon, as a retired investment banker I had enough money to live. The question is really what do you do with your life.”
Parsa came to Britain as a refugee in 1982 after fleeing the Islamic revolution. He arrived in Britain aged 16 with little to his name.
“Saying I was a refugee is kind of dramatizing it a bit,” he said. “I was that, but I was lucky enough to be born in a very loving middle-class family and so by the time I left Iran at the age of 16, all the foundations were there.”
Parsa, 56, earned a place at University College London in the mid-1980s and went on to gain a doctorate in engineering physics. He then pursued a career in finance – working for Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs before founding a chain of hospitals, Circle Healthcare.
He left the business in 2012 and set up Babylon a year later. The company works with the National Health Service in the UK to offer virtual consultations with general practitioners and uses artificial intelligence to help with healthcare. It expanded to the US last year, where it has grown rapidly.
“The question is: can you do with healthcare what Google did with information?” Parsa said. “Can you make it accessible, affordable and put it in the hands of every human being? What we try to do in Babylon is fundamentally to solve for this accessibility, quality and affordability. If I can deliver most of the healthcare most people need on devices they already have mobile devices that’s highly accessible.”
Babylon will join New York’s Nasdaq market through a merger with Alkuri Global, a special purpose acquisition company or SPAC. Babylon will raise just over half a billion dollars through the transaction. Parsa said the funds would go toward expansion in the US.
“I think we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface in the US,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do in the US still. That’s where our focus is going to be in the next few years. We also are seeing a lot of demand from South East Asia and that probably will come after.
“For us, this is always about how do you surely but safely grow the business. The demand is more than what we’ve got. The reality is we have to manage that demand very carefully.”
