Nawal Roy

Founder & CEO Holmusk

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Nawal Roy founded Holmusk to attack a specific gap: behavioural health has historically lacked the kind of large, structured, longitudinal outcome data that oncology and cardiology take for granted, which leaves much of psychiatric treatment running on trial and error. Holmusk’s answer is NeuroBlu, a de-identified real-world evidence platform built from US behavioural health electronic health records and paired with no-code analytics software so that clinicians and researchers, rather than data engineers, can interrogate it. The company now runs from Singapore, New York, London and Basel, and states that NeuroBlu covers roughly 46.5 million patients across all fifty US states with more than twenty years of longitudinal history. Roy came to the problem from outside medicine, having spent a career in finance and strategy consulting and having previously built HelloPay, a Rocket Internet payments venture.

Career Highlights

• Founder and chief executive of Holmusk, named as such on the company’s own leadership page.
• Built NeuroBlu into what the company describes as the largest behavioural health real-world data asset of its kind, spanning inpatient and outpatient settings and including 12.6 million patients with major depressive disorder.
• Closed a $45m Series B announced 9 January 2023, led by Veradigm with Heritas Capital, Health Catalyst Capital, Novartis’s dRx Capital and Northwell Holdings participating, and a parallel data partnership routing Veradigm patient cohorts into NeuroBlu.
• Has raised over $100m in total financing for Holmusk and completed acquisitions in both the US and the UK.
• Founded and led HelloPay, a Rocket Internet-backed payments venture, before moving into healthcare.
• Appointed a strategic advisor to MYndspan, a magnetoencephalography-based brain health company, in April 2025.
• Board member of the Healthy Brains Global Initiative; co-chair of the Kennedy Forum’s Data and Measurement Committee since 2023; served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Mental Health from 2021 to 2022.

Professional Journey

Roy’s career began in finance, on his own account starting at the Bombay Stock Exchange and later taking in positions at banks including Credit Suisse, before he moved into strategy consulting at McKinsey & Company serving international clients. That combination — fifteen-plus years across finance and consulting — is the background Holmusk’s own leadership page leads with, and it explains a company built as much around data assets and partnership structures as around clinical software.

Before healthcare came payments. Roy founded and ran HelloPay, a venture backed by Rocket Internet, building a regional payments business in South East Asia. It was his first operating role at the head of a company rather than an advisory one.

Holmusk followed, and represented a deliberate change of problem rather than a change of method. The insight was that the evidence base in behavioural health was thin not because the data did not exist but because it sat unstructured in electronic health records, unusable for research. NeuroBlu was the response: a de-identified longitudinal database assembled from those records, coupled with analytics software carrying pre-built study templates so that a clinician or health economist could run a cohort study without writing code.

The January 2023 Series B marked the point at which that thesis attracted strategic rather than purely financial capital. Veradigm, a healthcare data and technology provider, led the $45m round and simultaneously agreed to route de-identified behavioural health cohorts of its own into NeuroBlu — an investment and a supply agreement in one, and the mechanism by which the database’s coverage stepped up. Existing investors Heritas Capital, Health Catalyst Capital, Novartis’s dRx Capital and Northwell Holdings followed on. Across all rounds Holmusk has raised more than $100m, and has bought companies in both the United States and the United Kingdom to extend the data asset and its European footprint.

Roy has also taken on positions in the wider mental health policy world, sitting on the board of the Healthy Brains Global Initiative, co-chairing the Kennedy Forum’s Data and Measurement Committee since 2023, and serving on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Mental Health for its 2021-2022 term. In April 2025 he was named a strategic advisor to MYndspan, which measures brain function using magnetoencephalography, a mandate that sits alongside rather than in place of his Holmusk role.

Education

University of Mumbai

MA, Economics

University of Cincinnati

MS, Quantitative Analysis

Roy additionally describes himself as a “double PhD dropout”; neither doctoral programme nor institution is named in any source located, and neither is recorded here.