From Happiest Nation to Healthiest World: Is Agora the Next Unicorn
HELSINKI, FI / ACCESS Newswire / July 23, 2025 / Finnish-Australian health technology company Agora, founded by Elizabeth Angel and Dr Olivia Lesslar, has officially launched Build Your Own Doc, a new platform feature that creates personalized AI-driven wellness solutions. The tool can integrate more than one billion biomarkers and over five thousand years of ancient wisdom. Additionally, it draws on two hundred million research papers to create bespoke programs in response to a user's labs and wearables. Agora aims to make proactive wellness more accessible through evidence-based guidance.
Elizabeth Angel, CEO of Agora, leads launch of AI wellness platform Build Your Own Doc.
'Wellness is the next human right,' said Angel, Agora's chief executive. 'Agora is not merely software. It is a cultural movement designed to make thriving normal.'
With global wellness spending projected to rise from 6.3 trillion to more than 9 trillion US dollars by 2028, the company sees growing demand for preventive tools. Research suggests stress may contribute to 90 percent of illness. Agora addresses this challenge by offering proactive insights for leading causes of chronic disease including heart conditions, cancer, stroke, and Alzheimer's.
Agora's leadership reflects a wide range of experience. Angel has worked in humanitarian aid, defense innovation, and applied science. Dr Lesslar, trained in psychoneuroimmunology, brings clinical depth. The idea for the platform was first developed in a Finnish forest, where the team envisioned a technology that blends nature, tradition, and modern science to support healthier habits.
The company emphasizes data privacy and user empowerment. Agora's zero-trust architecture ensures personal health data remains under individual control. Users can opt to license anonymized data for research, receive incentives for meeting wellness milestones, or access insurer discounts. 'Health data is the battleground of trust,' Angel said. 'Agora ensures users remain the primary beneficiaries of their own information.'
Agora logo
The platform's gamified health adventures include sleep tracking, nutrition challenges, and reflective activities. Pilot users reported a 42 percent increase in healthy behavior adherence compared to traditional apps. Other features include community groups and fun support groups focused on healthspan vs lifespan and emotional well-being. Unlike single-focus platforms, Agora combines biometric feedback from both the body and brain, lab results, the user's own assessments and contextual inputs to generate cohesive recommendations through an interactive experience. The goal is to unify fragmented wellness tools into a single, user-friendly system.
Since March 2023, Agora has launched across six continents, working with veterans, nonprofits, and educational groups. The platform's free Library tier includes neuroscience-informed music by Ravyn Lyte, an AI-generated artist designed to support calm and focus. Agora's enterprise pilots are scheduled to begin in Q3 with several Fortune 500 companies, targeting workplace burnout and stress. Additional testing with military teams includes gamified adventures for consolidating resilience. Research is also underway to evaluate its benefits for frontline workers and trauma response.
Stress-related productivity losses cost the global economy nearly one trillion US dollars each year. Companies face an additional 18 percent payroll impact due to employee disengagement. Agora's approach offers a scalable method to improve well-being and quality of life.
Analysts highlight the platform's low acquisition cost and strong alignment with demand for alternative wellness solutions. Angel emphasized mission over market value. 'The goal is to help billions thrive. Subscription revenue from enterprises helps us offer access to the people who need it most.'
Agora continues to expand its partnerships across public and private sectors. If adoption accelerates, Finland may soon be known not only as the world's happiest nation but also as a leader in preventive health innovation.
About Agora
Agora is a global innovation company that accelerates groundbreaking solutions by cross-pollinating emerging technologies across traditionally siloed industries, from health to defense to music and everything in between. Fueling a worldwide movement that spans six continents, Agora creatively bridges the gap between innovation and the critical resources needed, such as funding and distribution channels, all with the aim of uplifting humanity.
Media Contact
Amy Wellington
Agora
[email protected]
Explore Agora
Registration is now open at golly.org
SOURCE: Agora
press release
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
WiseTech Global appoints insider Zubin Appoo as permanent CEO
(Reuters) -Australian logistics software maker WiseTech Global on Monday said it named its chief of staff, Zubin Appoo, as its permanent chief executive, to replace interim CEO Andrew Cartledge. The company's co-founder and long-serving chief executive, Richard White, stepped down last October, following media reports of allegations about his personal life. Cartledge, who was the chief financial officer, was appointed interim CEO following White's exit. Appoo has been with WiseTech for about 15 years, most recently as chief of staff and deputy chief innovation officer, a role he was appointed to in April. His appointment as CEO is effective immediately, and Cartledge will remain with the company till his retirement at the end of calendar 2025, the company said. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
WiseTech Global appoints insider Zubin Appoo as permanent CEO
(Reuters) -Australian logistics software maker WiseTech Global on Monday said it named its chief of staff, Zubin Appoo, as its permanent chief executive, to replace interim CEO Andrew Cartledge. The company's co-founder and long-serving chief executive, Richard White, stepped down last October, following media reports of allegations about his personal life. Cartledge, who was the chief financial officer, was appointed interim CEO following White's exit. Appoo has been with WiseTech for about 15 years, most recently as chief of staff and deputy chief innovation officer, a role he was appointed to in April. His appointment as CEO is effective immediately, and Cartledge will remain with the company till his retirement at the end of calendar 2025, the company said.
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
OpenAI: ChatGPT Wants Legal Rights. You Need The Right To Be Forgotten.
As systems like ChatGPT move toward achieving legal privilege, the boundaries between identity, ... More memory, and control are being redefined, often without consent. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently stated that conversations with ChatGPT should one day enjoy legal privilege, similar to those between a patient and a doctor or a client and a lawyer, he wasn't just referring to privacy. He was pointing toward a redefinition of the relationship between people and machines. Legal privilege protects the confidentiality of certain relationships. What's said between a patient and physician, or a client and attorney, is shielded from subpoenas, court disclosures, and adversarial scrutiny. Extending that same protection to AI interactions means treating the machine not as a tool, but as a participant in a privileged exchange. This is more than a policy suggestion. It's a legal and philosophical shift with consequences no one has fully reckoned with. It also comes at a time when the legal system is already being tested. In The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI, the paper has asked courts to compel the company to preserve all user prompts, including those the company says are deleted after 30 days. That request is under appeal. Meanwhile, Altman's suggestion that AI chats deserve legal shielding raises the question: if they're protected like therapy sessions, what does that make the system listening on the other side? People are already treating AI like a confidant. According to Common Sense Media, three in four teens have used an AI chatbot, and over half say they trust the advice they receive at least somewhat. Many describe a growing reliance on these systems to process everything from school to relationships. Altman himself has called this emotional over-reliance 'really bad and dangerous.' But it's not just teens. AI is being integrated into therapeutic apps, career coaching tools, HR systems, and even spiritual guidance platforms. In some healthcare environments, AI is being used to draft communications and interpret lab data before a doctor even sees it. These systems are present in decision-making loops, and their presence is being normalized. This is how it begins. First, protect the conversation. Then, protect the system. What starts as a conversation about privacy quickly evolves into a framework centered on rights, autonomy, and standing. We've seen this play out before. In U.S. law, corporations were gradually granted legal personhood, not because they were considered people, but because they acted as consistent legal entities that required protection and responsibility under the law. Over time, personhood became a useful legal fiction. Something similar may now be unfolding with AI—not because it is sentient, but because it interacts with humans in ways that mimic protected relationships. The law adapts to behavior, not just biology. The Legal System Isn't Ready For What ChatGPT Is Proposing There is no global consensus on how to regulate AI memory, consent, or interaction logs. The EU's AI Act introduces transparency mandates, but memory rights are still undefined. In the U.S., state-level data laws conflict, and no federal policy yet addresses what it means to interact with a memory‑enabled AI. (See my recent Forbes piece on why AI regulation is effectively dead—and what businesses need to do instead.) The physical location of a server is not just a technical detail. It's a legal trigger. A conversation stored on a server in California is subject to U.S. law. If it's routed through Frankfurt, it becomes subject to GDPR. When AI systems retain memory, context, and inferred consent, the server location effectively defines sovereignty over the interaction. That has implications for litigation, subpoenas, discovery, and privacy. 'I almost wish they'd go ahead and grant these AI systems legal personhood, as if they were therapists or clergy,' says technology attorney John Kheit. 'Because if they are, then all this passive data collection starts to look a lot like an illegal wiretap, which would thereby give humans privacy rights/protections when interacting with AI. It would also, then, require AI providers to disclose 'other parties to the conversation', i.e., that the provider is a mining party reading the data, and if advertisers are getting at the private conversations.' Infrastructure choices are now geopolitical. They determine how AI systems behave under pressure and what recourse a user has when something goes wrong. And yet, underneath all of this is a deeper motive: monetization. But they won't be the only ones asking questions. Every conversation becomes a four-party exchange: the user, the model, the platform's internal optimization engine, and the advertiser paying for access. It's entirely plausible for a prompt about the Pittsburgh Steelers to return a response that subtly inserts 'Buy Coke' mid-paragraph. Not because it's relevant—but because it's profitable. Recent research shows users are significantly worse at detecting unlabeled advertising when it's embedded inside AI-generated content. Worse, these ads are initially rated as more trustworthy until users discover they are, in fact, ads. At that point, they're also rated as more manipulative. 'In experiential marketing, trust is everything,' says Jeff Boedges, Founder of Soho Experiential. 'You can't fake a relationship, and you can't exploit it without consequence. If AI systems are going to remember us, recommend things to us, or even influence us, we'd better know exactly what they remember and why. Otherwise, it's not personalization. It's manipulation.' Now consider what happens when advertisers gain access to psychographic modeling: 'Which users are most emotionally vulnerable to this type of message?' becomes a viable, queryable prompt. And AI systems don't need to hand over spreadsheets to be valuable. With retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the model can shape language in real time based on prior sentiment, clickstream data, and fine-tuned advertiser objectives. This isn't hypothetical—it's how modern adtech already works. At that point, the chatbot isn't a chatbot. It's a simulation environment for influence. It is trained to build trust, then designed to monetize it. Your behavioral patterns become the product. Your emotional response becomes the target for optimization. The business model is clear: black-boxed behavioral insight at scale, delivered through helpful design, hidden from oversight, and nearly impossible to detect. We are entering a phase where machines will be granted protections without personhood, and influence without responsibility. If a user confesses to a crime during a legally privileged AI session, is the platform compelled to report it or remain silent? And who makes that decision? These are not edge cases. They are coming quickly. And they are coming at scale. Why ChatGPT Must Remain A Model—and Why Humans Must Regain Consent As generative AI systems evolve into persistent, adaptive participants in daily life, it becomes more important than ever to reassert a boundary: models must remain models. They cannot assume the legal, ethical, or sovereign status of a person quietly. And the humans generating the data that train these systems must retain explicit rights over their contributions. What we need is a standardized, enforceable system of data contracting, one that allows individuals to knowingly, transparently, and voluntarily contribute data for a limited, mutually agreed-upon window of use. This contract must be clear on scope, duration, value exchange, and termination. And it must treat data ownership as immutable, even during active use. That means: When a contract ends, or if a company violates its terms, the individual's data must, by law, be erased from the model, its training set, and any derivative products. 'Right to be forgotten' must mean what it says. But to be credible, this system must work both ways: This isn't just about ethics. It's about enforceable, mutual accountability. The user experience must be seamless and scalable. The legal backend must be secure. And the result should be a new economic compact—where humans know when they're participating in AI development, and models are kept in their place. ChatGPT Is Changing the Risk Surface. Here's How to Respond. The shift toward AI systems as quasi-participants—not just tools—will reshape legal exposure, data governance, product liability, and customer trust. Whether you're building AI, integrating it into your workflows, or using it to interface with customers, here are five things you should be doing immediately: ChatGPT May Get Privilege. You Should Get the Right to Be Forgotten. This moment isn't just about what AI can do. It's about what your business is letting it do, what it remembers, and who gets access to that memory. Ignore that, and you're not just risking privacy violations, you're risking long-term brand trust and regulatory blowback. At the very least, we need a legal framework that defines how AI memory is governed. Not as a priest, not as a doctor, and not as a partner, but perhaps as a witness. Something that stores information and can be examined when context demands it, with clear boundaries on access, deletion, and use. The public conversation remains focused on privacy. But the fundamental shift is about control. And unless the legal and regulatory frameworks evolve rapidly, the terms of engagement will be set, not by policy or users, but by whoever owns the box. Which is why, in the age of AI, the right to be forgotten may become the most valuable human right we have. Not just because your data could be used against you—but because your identity itself can now be captured, modeled, and monetized in ways that persist beyond your control. Your patterns, preferences, emotional triggers, and psychological fingerprints don't disappear when the session ends. They live on inside a system that never forgets, never sleeps, and never stops optimizing. Without the ability to revoke access to your data, you don't just lose privacy. You lose leverage. You lose the ability to opt out of prediction. You lose control over how you're remembered, represented, and replicated. The right to be forgotten isn't about hiding. It's about sovereignty. And in a world where AI systems like ChatGPT will increasingly shape our choices, our identities, and our outcomes, the ability to walk away may be the last form of freedom that still belongs to you.
