Founders Interviews — Guilherme Weigert, Conexa Saúde

First, can you tell us about your professional background and the path that led you to Conexa?

My name is Guillerme. I am the co-founder and CEO of Conexa Saúde, and I am actually a physician; I’m a cardiologist. I graduated from the Federal University of Rio, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

What led me to found Conexa was a mix of the particular environment I was born in, with my father being a physician and my mother being a tech developer. I was exposed to both technology and health from an early age, and I really enjoyed it.

Before founding Conexa, I founded Jaleko, a medical education platform that ended up being a really hyper-growth company, reaching more than 200,000 medical students. It was sort of a Netflix for medical students.

In 2017, I created Conexa with the objective of building a unique digital platform that could improve access to healthcare in Brazil and better the efficiency of the Brazilian healthcare system. And that drive to bring structured healthcare to more people in the country became Conexa.

How was Conexa born?

Conexa was born eight years ago. When I met Fernando and Romeo, we were all trying to find a way to fix the broken healthcare system in the country; we wanted to reshape the way people were medically treated.

In Brazil, the healthcare system is centered around hospitals, and we all know hospitals face issues like long wait times, not only for more serious cases but also for basic appointments, overcrowding of emergency rooms, lack of staff, etc, and people with common colds or a simple headache resorted to going there because they couldn’t be treated elsewhere. We also saw that everything was treated based on diseases and not prevention. And this only aggravated the inefficiency and led to fragmented care.

So we had the thought of building a digital platform that could create a unique environment to improve healthcare for our patients and to increase access for everyone, with the goal of bringing some efficiency to the country’s healthcare system.

How is your product different from the others in the market? What makes it unique?

We created a unique healthcare ecosystem that can go from prevention to treatments that take care of diseases. Conexa is not only about physical health; it also encompasses mental health. We are able to improve not only access to health care but also its efficiency.

We can improve financial and healthcare outcomes for our clients, that is, companies, health insurance, and B2B channels; we have a big scale. More than 25 million patients are covered by Conexa, and we reach more than 500,000 consultations per month.

Conexa created a really unique ecosystem that can take care of more than only one condition; it can assist a range of patients with diverse conditions. A 360 model, from primary care to secondary care it can create a unique patient experience.

All patient data can be stratified to see if not only the patient’s issue is being treated, but it can also help them improve other conditions, like chronic, mental health, and urgent care conditions. With TDscale, with a lot of data, with AI at the center of our journey, we can personalize healthcare as a unique platform.

How was Conexa’s expansion through the years?

I think the company had a lot of crucial moments, but I can focus on a really difficult moment that we had. In 2021, we decided to change, to pivot a lot of our business.

Before the pandemic, we were really focused on building a software-as-a-service solution. But when we saw the environment that the pandemic was creating, we decided to change our model to Mora Health Tech Enabler service, so we built our own group of doctors and health care professionals, and we decided to refocus in this way because at that time we knew that to improve access, we had to control health indicators and health outcomes, and if we did just the SAS solution, we would not be able to control the entire patient journey.

At that moment, 90% of our revenue was from the SAS solution, so it. Changing the whole company to be more of a tech and health company, not just tech, was a really difficult and challenging moment.

We stopped growing for four/six months just to pivot the mode, but it ended up being a really good decision because after that, we started to grow a lot. Not only did the number of teleconsultations increase, but we started to establish a reputation. And we now have something that differentiates us from all other competitors. It was really tough, but a crucial moment for Conexa.

If you could go back in time, is there anything you’d do differently?

I would definitely do some things differently. We made a lot of mistakes, but there is one thing that I wish I could change: focus.

Right now, we are focusing on just doing a few things better. But in 2020, we didn’t know which one of the solutions would grow more, and we decided to do some solutions in parallel. But it was a wrong decision because we didn’t grow the best product we had; it ended up being a distraction for us. So if I went back to the past, I would have focused on fewer things rather than many.

Do you have any tips or advice for an aspiring founder?

One of the things I learned at the beginning of the journey was to have people in your team who align with your principles, values, and behaviors. Don’t be afraid to avoid people who are not aligned with your principles, because in the mid to long term, this will be really important, as the company will stop growing.

When expanding your team, be aware of the Talent Density culture principle. In early-stage, high-growth companies, the quality of your people, not just the quantity, is your most powerful source of unique differentiation. Focus on talent density to ensure rapid, sustainable scaling.

Lastly, what has been the most challenging part of growing your startup? And the funnier part?

I think the most fun part is that we get to learn a lot and go through challenges with great people who make it an awesome journey. It’s really fun, like a rollercoaster, sometimes we are at the peak and sometimes we are going down, but we always recover and we know it. It’s fun because you know when you are going down, it’s only the path to gain speed to go back up again. But you never know when it will go down, so don’t be too confident or arrogant.

The most challenging part of growing a startup is that you have to be humble enough to be able to accept that there is a lot you don’t know, that there are a lot of things that you still have to learn. You have to be humble and keep learning and developing new skills. You have to become the CEO the company needs.