Etienne Adriaenssen: Medical Testing Made Easy and Accessible

Entrepreneur Etienne Adriaenssen next to Spiffy the Interplanetary Journalist Hi everyone, my name is Spiffy, Interplanetary Journalist for Ladderworks and entrepreneurial enthusiast. I’m here bringing you the stories of social entrepreneurs making the world more equitable. Today I’m speaking to Etienne Adriaenssen, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of DasLab, the company making medical testing more efficient.

Spiffy: Hey there Etienne, what challenges are you addressing?

Etienne: Hi Spiffy, we’re making access to diagnostic and lab tests more cheap, efficient, and accessible. During the pandemic, people have realized that they could get tested for things without going through a doctor. You can track your own weight and steps, why could you not track some values in your blood? Or check if the supplements you are taking are working as intended and much more?

Spiffy: That makes a lot of sense. What motivated you to do this?

Etienne: We started doing this to help with COVID-19. Testing programs were unable to reach their capacity due to process bottlenecks, so we built software to help address this, load balancing, and networking labs. We then proceeded to build software to improve the customer experience, network test stations, and streamline processes for testing and now vaccinations.

Spiffy: That’s been a serious challenge since the pandemic started. How does it help make the world a more equitable place?

Etienne: We’re reducing the costs of tests for traveling. We make testing more accessible by bringing it to the workplace for many large companies, making vaccinations more accessible, for example, we have worked with KPMG and AirBus to bring vaccinations to the workplace. In the future, we plan to have a general marketplace for health tests, both for consumers and corporate sponsors, putting pressure on price and quality of service so more people can access diagnostic testing, for COVID-19 or anything else—from blood to radiography.

Spiffy: What’s a recent milestone you’ve reached with DasLab?

Etienne: We recently hit 250,000 tests enabled via our software, considering we were founded in September 2020 and did our first test in November 2020. I think that's pretty good!

Spiffy: I think so too! What’s a time that you faced failure and overcame it?

Etienne: We were finalists for the national testing program for a large European country and then very narrowly lost the bid. This would have been a huge win, but medical compliance was much harder than anticipated. We went on to win many other large contracts in the corporate space. We learned that working with governments is very hard and risky for young startups.

Spiffy: Those are tough but necessary lessons to learn, I guess. Thanks so much for coming and talking to me Etienne, it’s been an honor!

Etienne Adriaenssen is a serial co-founder, CTO, entrepreneur, technologist, hacker, and engineer! He is currently working on DasLab, a platform for peace of mind via diagnostic testing.

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