I built Praneya because I was the patient who needed it.

In March this year, I was sitting alone in the transit lounge at Kuala Lumpur airport. Long layover. Flying from India back to New Zealand.

I'd visited family in Kerala on a short trip — the kind where you try to squeeze in everyone and everything in a few days. But I'd also done something I'd been putting off since turning 50. I got routine blood tests done. Nothing dramatic. The basic panel any GP would order for a man my age. Lipids, glucose, liver function, the usual.

In the quiet of the transit lounge, I opened the reports on my phone and went through them properly for the first time.

I'm a cardiologist. I read blood tests every working day. In my clinical life, I am very comfortable with numbers like these — when they belong to someone else.

But sitting in that airport lounge, reading my own numbers, I felt something different. Not alarm exactly. More like recognition. By any standard clinical definition, I had early metabolic syndrome. Four out of five criteria, quietly ticked off.

And I felt completely healthy. That was the part that unsettled me.

I eat well — or thought I did. I don't smoke. I don't drink. I have a young family, a demanding job, a full life. I assumed that decent food and an active lifestyle would be enough. Clearly, I was not being fully honest with myself.

The gap I couldn't unsee

Here is what I realised in that transit lounge: if I — someone who has spent their entire career in cardiac medicine — didn't have a clear picture of what my own blood tests meant for my daily life, what specific changes to make, what to monitor, what actually works and what doesn't… then almost nobody does.

In my clinical work, I see the downstream consequences every day. By the time a patient reaches me, the window for prevention has often narrowed. The lifestyle conversation gets compressed into a five-minute chat at the end of a clinic visit, squeezed between medications and procedure planning. Preventative cardiology — the things you can do at home, before you ever need someone like me — gets overlooked. Not because clinicians don't care, but because the system isn't built to deliver it.

I had that long layover. I had nowhere to be. So I did what I know how to do — I went deep into the research.

What I did next

Over the following weeks, I built myself a plan. Not a generic wellness guide — a specific, evidence-based programme grounded in what the clinical literature actually shows. I ranked supplements by the strength of their trial data. I designed a nutrition framework around the foods I grew up eating in Kerala — sardines, mackerel, red rice, jackfruit, bitter gourd — because sustainable change has to fit your real life, not a template from someone else's culture.

I set up proper monitoring: structured home blood pressure protocols, wearable tracking, weekly self-assessments. I worked out which investigations I actually needed and why. I built a twelve-week programme, day by day, because I know from years of clinical practice that telling someone to “eat better and exercise more” is useless without specificity.

That document ended up being over thirty pages. It was the plan I wished I could hand to every patient who walks out of a clinic holding a stack of numbers and no idea what to do with them.

Why Praneya exists

That plan is what became Praneya.

Not everyone can dig through meta-analyses and build a structured lifestyle programme for themselves. But everyone deserves access to the kind of specific, personalised guidance that good preventative cardiology can offer — presented in plain language, grounded in clinical guidelines, and shaped around the life they actually live.

Many people — through no fault of their own — carry genes that put them at higher risk. Family history of high cholesterol. Premature coronary artery disease. South Asian heritage, where metabolic risk arrives earlier and at lower BMIs. Others have had a scare: an unexpected finding on a scan, a silent event they didn't know about until later.

All of them deserve more than a pamphlet.

Praneya takes the blood reports your doctor orders and the wearable data you're already collecting, and helps you see what they mean together — in plain language, with specific actions, grounded in the same clinical guidelines your cardiologist uses.

Praneya is a wellness companion, not a medical device. It doesn't replace your doctor. It gives you enough of your own picture that the next conversation with your clinician starts on the right page.

I didn't build Praneya because I saw a market opportunity. I built it because I was the patient who needed it. And I suspect you might be too.