The doctor Is still in the loop: Valeo Health on AI, data residency, and the future of Gulf preventive care

UAE-based preventive health platform Valeo Health has reached one million orders since its founding five years ago, releasing anonymised user data alongside the milestone that points to significant levels of undetected metabolic risk among first-time testers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

The findings reflect a platform that has grown well beyond individual diagnostics. In an interview with HealthTechAsia, Nadine Karadag, Co-Founder of Valeo Health, explains how the company is scaling preventive care across the GCC — and why keeping a doctor in the loop is a principle it has no intention of engineering away.

Who typically uses the Valeo app, and does that user profile shift between markets, for example UAE versus Saudi Arabia?

Our core user is the longevity focused individual, typically in their 30s to 50s, who want to improve their health and energy level early rather than wait for symptoms: proactive rather than reactive. But the platform has grown well beyond that. We now treat several metabolic issues such as Obesity, Diabetes, PMOS and also serve families through kids-specific testing and elderly-care solutions, so for many households, Valeo Health is becoming the place they manage health across generations.

Users reach us through two main channels: individuals who come for diagnostics, longevity tracking, and at-home testing, and a fast-growing corporate wellness population whose employer offers Valeo as a benefit. The profile does shift across markets. The UAE skews more expat- and individual-subscriber-heavy, while Saudi Arabia skews younger, more Saudi-national, and more corporate-led — tracking both the Vision 2030 employer-wellness push and a younger population overall.

Which of the four markets has been hardest to enter from a regulatory standpoint, and why?

UAE and Saudi Arabia have been extremely forthcoming when it comes to digital health – the health regulators see Valeo as a partner in prevention. We have been extremely fortunate to be working with such visionary regulators. For example, to help us with our launch back in 2021, DHA gave us 1 year to comply with certain regulations rather than slowing us down.

Regulations around digital and at-home health in Kuwait and Qatar are still evolving, and we are working with the e-health division of MoH in Qatar to build our offering.

Are there plans to expand beyond these four markets? If so, which regulatory environment would you study first before committing?

Yes. Our footprint already extends across the GCC — we are live in Bahrain and Oman alongside our core markets — and the ambition is to cover the region fully, then expand  beyond globally if things go as planned.

But our test for a new market is not “can we plant a flag there.” It is whether we can actually add value — solve a real health-access or longevity problem for that population — rather than just register a presence. So the environment we study first is the one where we believe we can make the biggest genuine difference. The regulation is something we then build to meet; it is not the thing that picks the market for us.

The release references AI-enabled insights feeding into a Longevity Score. What is that model trained on, where is it hosted, and how does that intersect with health data residency requirements?

The Longevity Score runs on our in-house model — it is not a black box we have licensed. It is built on established biomarker research, and critically, its outputs are reviewed by a licensed clinician before they reach the user, never handed over unmediated.

Regarding hosting, our data sits in the UAE, KSA, and Qatar today. The principle is straightforward: regulated health data stays in the jurisdiction that requires it. We build the infrastructure for the residency rule, not around it.

Beyond the AI model itself, what safeguards protect the broader range of health data Valeo collects — from blood test results to wearable data to family health profiles?

Trust here is non-negotiable, so we hold ourselves to independent, audited standards rather than local minimums. Valeo Health is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified — the international standard for information security management — independently audited and certified in December 2022.

We apply the same security discipline across the health data we hold, from blood test results to wearable data to family health profiles: encryption, strict role-based access controls, and defined handling throughout the data’s full lifecycle. Our data practices are also compliant with HIPAA and GDPR.

And we treat this as a moving bar, not a box to tick. We are continuously investing in raising our security and safety posture as the data we hold — and our users’ expectations — grow.

Corporate wellness contracts typically involve some data-sharing with employers. What is the boundary between what an employer can see and what stays private to the individual?

The principle is simple: employers see populations, never individuals. We actually run this on ourselves — Valeo employees use the platform too. So a corporate report might say something like “the Dubai office shows a pattern of Vitamin D and B12 deficiency” — a population-level insight the employer can act on with better benefits or interventions.

But no one, including us internally on the corporate side, can tie that back to a named individual. An employer never sees a specific person’s blood results, Longevity Score or any identifiable record. That stays strictly between the user and Valeo’s clinical team.

What is next for the app itself — are there features or services in development that haven’t launched yet?

We are building out more retention-focused health programs — keeping people engaged in their longevity journey over the long term, not just at the point of a single test. We are expanding our corporate offering, since that is where we can shift population health at scale. And we are investing heavily in deep wearable integrations, so someone’s day-to-day data — sleep, activity, recovery — feeds into genuinely personalised interventions rather than generic advice.

The direction is from one-off insight toward continuous, tailored guidance.

Are AI-generated insights reviewed by a clinician before reaching the user?

We are deliberately measured here. AI is powerful but still evolving, and in health, we believe strong safety guardrails are not optional — so we always keep a clinician in the loop. The AI surfaces patterns and flags; it never delivers a clinical verdict to the user on its own.

Every insight is reviewed by a licensed clinician before it reaches the user, and the AI augments that clinical judgment rather than replacing it. As the technology matures, that principle — a doctor between the model and the patient — is one we intend to hold onto, not engineer away.