Daring voices: Govin Murugachandran
Welcome to Daring Voices, our series spotlighting the founders in the Daring Capital community. In each edition, we sit down with a founder to hear their journey in their own words: from their origin story, to the challenges they’ve faced, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.
This week, we talk to Govin Murugachandran, founder of Zonder.
What problem is Zonder solving and what inspired you to tackle it?
We're tackling the chronic disease crisis. These are long-term illnesses (conditions like diabetes, asthma, chronic heart disease) and we probably all know somebody who has one. What we've seen is that these conditions have been surging over time. In the UK alone, more than a quarter of people now live with at least one long-term illness, and the biggest challenge is that there simply aren't enough resources to address the demand. As a result, people are getting sicker.
There are more hospital admissions, more cost on the system, more strain on the economy, and fundamentally, people are spending more of their lives sick than healthy. In healthcare, this is probably the biggest challenge we're facing as a society right now.
My background is as a doctor. I've seen this from the clinical side. I work in a surgical specialty, and many of our patients coming through have long-term illnesses. But my deeper perspective on this problem came from being on the other side of the table, as a patient. I had cancer when I was very young, and the treatment left me with a long-standing heart condition. Then, just before the pandemic, I was diagnosed again.
That experience gave me a completely different lens on the way healthcare is delivered, and how much harder it's becoming. The needs of patients are growing, and the system is struggling to keep up. We have some of the best medical talent in the world in this country, and yet our healthcare system is under enormous strain. That's what drove us to look seriously at how we could help solve it.
Obviously cancer wasn't on your cards. What do you think you'd be doing now had you not had that experience?
My health has shaped my career from the very beginning. When I was first diagnosed, I was nine months old. I spent a lot of my life in and out of hospital, so it's no surprise I eventually chose to become a doctor. Some of the most inspiring people I've ever met have been the people who helped me through my own care journey.
Honestly, I'm not sure what my life would have looked like without those experiences. I got my first diagnosis so young that I don't know a world without it. And if I'm being truly honest, I'm not sure I would have continued as a doctor had I not gone through all of this.
What has always driven me is the sense that I'm doing something meaningful, something with real importance and the potential to change someone's life. As a surgeon, you do that one patient at a time. When you're building something in technology, you get to do it at scale. That's enormously motivating.
At Zonder we pick up patients who haven't been seen for years, for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes the interventions are life-changing. We recently identified a patient who had just had a heart attack. We were able to intervene. That was partly luck, but it happened because we were proactively reaching out to patients who'd fallen through the gaps. Their health was affecting their ability to work, to be present for their families. Knowing that we can change that trajectory is what gets me up in the morning. And it's what motivates everyone at Zonder.
Is there anything you learnt as a patient that you brought into building Zonder?
When you're a clinician, it's very easy to look at the guidance and say: this is what you need to do. It's much harder to put yourself in the shoes of a patient. Medications have side effects that affect daily routines. People have things going on in their lives that affect their ability to engage with their care. What being a patient gave me, more than anything, is humility and the ability to empathise more closely with people.
Take something as simple as post-operative pain. You can tell a patient it's going to be painful and prescribe them painkillers, but if you've never experienced that pain yourself, you don't really know what it's like. You don't know how long it lasts, how it affects daily life, what those side effects actually feel like. Being on the receiving end of care changes how you communicate with patients entirely.
In chronic disease management, where the sheer volume of patients is so high, the challenge is delivering care that is genuinely personalised, not just in principle, but in practice. That's hard to do at scale. Right now, having a chronic condition often means coordinating across multiple doctors, multiple specialties, multiple touchpoints. It's resource-heavy and frequently fragmented. The question that drives us at Zonder is: can we deliver care that is personal, impactful, and scalable? Because what we're doing right now, as a system, isn't working.
How does Zonder stand out from what already exists?
There are a lot of organisations trying to address chronic healthcare. Our focus is on bringing human and technology together, and that distinction matters. The quality of care we deliver is consistently rated above and beyond the standard of care by the practices we work with, and that's reflected in how both patients and GP practices experience our service.
On the technology side, what sets us apart is how we integrate our clinical teams with our platform. There are solutions out there that are purely technology-focused, managing part of the pathway. There are others, like us, looking at technology and people together. But our specific USP is that we've identified where the real bottleneck lies: in how human resources are being deployed to chronic disease management. That's what we've built Zonder around solving.
Can people access Zonder through the NHS?
As an NHS patient, your GP practice needs to be working with us for you to access our service. Once they are, patients can reach out to us directly about their conditions, and we can support them, direct them to the right places, and provide genuinely holistic care.
A good example: we had a patient, an 80-year-old woman, who was breathless and no longer leaving her house. We optimised her care and her breathlessness improved, but she still wasn't going out. Our team did a social assessment and realised she had the wrong mobility aid. We switched her to a tri-walker, working through her GP practice, and suddenly she was getting out again and no longer needed home visits.
That's what good chronic disease management looks like. When care is joined up and holistic, it doesn't just help the individual patient. It reduces pressure on the wider system. The worst 25% of chronic disease patients consume more than 60% of resources. If you can break that cycle, proactively supporting those patients before they deteriorate further, you change the equation entirely.
What's been the biggest challenge in developing Zonder?
Building in healthcare is genuinely tough. It's a fragmented system, and one of the things that became clear very early on is that no two GP practices work in quite the same way. Different workflows, different patient populations, different ethnic communities with different health needs. Building something that can adapt to that variability is a real and ongoing challenge.
Alongside that, there are the standard pressures of building an early-stage company: raising investment, building the right team, and maintaining the quality of care throughout all of it. There's no point in growing if the thing that makes you valuable starts to slip.
What would you want someone going through what you went through to know about chronic disease management?
This is less advice and more an observation. I've engaged with the healthcare system with the advantage of understanding it, knowing what questions to ask, how to weigh up options, how to advocate for myself. That makes an enormous difference. Most patients don't have that advantage.
So the first thing I'd say is: don't be afraid to engage with your GP or doctor. If you're not getting the answers you need, keep asking. Writing your questions down before an appointment helps. It means you can go through them systematically rather than leaving and realising you forgot to ask the thing that was worrying you most.
And if you can understand what you need to do for your own healthcare, you're actually making your doctor's job easier too. Being informed and prepared is one of the most powerful things a patient can do.
How has the reception been from GP practices?
I want to start by saying I have enormous empathy for GP practices right now. They're being asked to deliver more and more with less and less, and at the same time they're being approached constantly by different solutions claiming to help. Cutting through that noise is genuinely hard. But what I've found is that once you have a GP's attention, and you can clearly demonstrate the value you bring to their practice, they're very willing to engage. The hardest part is getting to that point.
We're also clear that we're not the right fit for every practice. We work best with practices that have specific needs that align with our model, and those practices are genuinely excelling. There are other practices where a purely technological solution might be a better match, and that's fine. Finding the right fit matters for everyone.
Have you faced challenges around investment, and how have you navigated them?
Early-stage companies relying heavily on angel funding are operating in a challenging climate right now. At the same time, the barrier to spinning up a piece of software has dropped significantly, which means investors are sifting through a much higher volume of opportunities than before. The bar for standing out is higher than it's ever been.
One thing I'd say to other founders is: engage investors early. Get them on the journey so they can see the progress you're making over time. That's something we did later than we should have. Jem was someone who had seen our journey at various stages, and I think that continuity made a real difference when it came to building trust and ultimately securing investment.
What's the dream for Zonder in the next five years?
We want to be the number one chronic disease management provider in the UK. Delivering high-quality care at scale, to patients with long-term illnesses, working hand in hand with GP practices and potentially secondary care, but with primary care as our home.
For patients, the dream is a journey that feels manageable. A genuine sense of confidence in their treatment. Less time going back and forth trying to navigate a stretched system, and much more control over their own condition. Chronic conditions ebb and flow. Asthma flares in summer, in winter, depending on the environment. Patients need dynamic support that moves with them. That's what Zonder is building towards: care that adapts, that's always there, and that makes a tangible difference to people's lives.
If you’d like to find out more about Zonder, you can visit the website.
A big thank you to Govin for sharing his journey.
Jem
and the team at Daring Capital
