Kellogg students launch new platform to support health and sustainability
Kellogg College is pleased to highlight an exciting student initiative: the launch of Synergya, a new platform created to help health, wellbeing and sustainability ventures scale through collaboration rather than capital alone.
Founded by Lucy Setian (MSc in Global Healthcare Leadership, 2024), Pearce Mutendera (MSc in Global Healthcare Leadership, 2024), Dr Theresa Reiker, and Dr Aleksandar Petrovic, Synergya has been developed in response to a challenge familiar to many entrepreneurs within the University community. Promising innovations often struggle to move beyond pilots because founders lack access to the right collaborators, commercial partners or distribution channels, particularly in a constrained funding environment.
Synergya aims to address this gap through an invite-only, zero-fee and zero-equity model that enables startups and scaleups to form joint ventures based on shared assets, networks and capabilities. An AI-powered engine identifies high-potential partner matches and uncovers growth opportunities across markets and sectors, allowing ventures to scale without giving up ownership.
The platform focuses on three areas of collaboration: marketing joint ventures, such as co-branding and cross-promotion; go-to-market partnerships ,including pilots and distribution; and investment readiness support. Alongside this, founders can access pro bono expertise designed to strengthen long-term impact and resilience.
Before co-founding Synergya, Lucy founded and led HealthTech Hub Africa, a pan African accelerator built to support local start-ups deliver more impactful HealthTech innovations. Her work helped scale up 68 start-ups across 17 countries, and earned a P3 Impact Award from the US Department of State, but it also taught her a valuable lesson: great ideas alone are not enough.“Too many founders are pushed into a false choice between slow growth and giving away equity”, she explains. “Synergya is about making a third path practical, where collaboration becomes a powerful engine for scale.”
The College looks forward to seeing how initiatives such as Synergya continue to support founder-led innovation in health and planetary wellbeing, both within Kellogg and across the wider Oxford community.
The Synergya team pictured