Qualevita https://qualevita.nlThis episode looks at Qualevita, a prevention and longevity company founded in Belgium in 2011 by Tatiana Bakunina with the support of Dr. Thierry Hertoghe. Now operating across London, Brussels, Andorra, Barcelona and the Netherlands, and working with clients from more than thirty five countries, the company builds personalised programmes around detailed analysis rather than generic advice. Markus explores their four pillar approach, why measurement has to come before any plan, and what changes when people stop guessing how they feel and start knowing where they stand.Here is something strange about the way most of us look after ourselves. We will happily service a car every year, checking things that are not broken, precisely so they do not become broken. We will run diagnostics on a laptop. We will have a boiler inspected. And then we will go a decade without once asking a serious question about the single piece of equipment we cannot replace, which is our own body. We wait until something announces itself. And by then, we are no longer making choices, we are responding to them.Welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and this is the show where I go looking for the businesses building something genuinely different, often in corners of the world most of us never think to look at. Today we are heading into the world of prevention and longevity, and to a company called Qualevita that has spent well over a decade arguing that the most useful moment to pay attention to your health is long before anything feels wrong.Let me start with where they came from, because the timeline here tells you something. Qualevita was established in 2011, in Belgium, by an entrepreneur named Tatiana Bakunina, with the support of Dr. Thierry Hertoghe, a specialist in preventive health. That founding date matters. In 2011 the word longevity was not a category. It was not a trend, there were no podcasts about it, no venture funds chasing it, no wearables making it fashionable. This was a company built on a conviction well before that conviction became popular, which is usually the sign of people who arrived at an idea by thinking rather than by following.From Belgium it expanded to Barcelona in 2014, and today Qualevita operates across London, Brussels, Andorra, and the Netherlands, working with clients from more than thirty five countries. That international spread is worth pausing on, because prevention is a field where local habits vary enormously. Diets differ, sleep patterns differ, working cultures differ, and what counts as normal differs. Running the same philosophy across that many countries forces a discipline on you, because whatever you build has to work for a person in Amsterdam and a person in Andorra, and those are not the same person.Tatiana Bakunina brings roughly twenty years in preventive health to this, and she is Harvard educated. In 2018 she went a step further and launched a separate venture called DIAGNOST, an online health analysis platform, which tells you something about how she thinks. The instinct there is not simply to build a nicer place for people to come to, it is to make the underlying analysis more accessible to people who are not standing in front of you. Her co-founder in Qualevita International, Habbo de Vaere, comes from a rather different world, with more than fifteen years in international sales, business development and private banking. I always find that combination promising. One founder who understands the substance, one who understands how to build the organisation around it, and enough respect between them to let each do their part.So what does the company actually do? At its heart, the idea is very simple, and the simplicity is the point. Most of us have no real information about our own biology. We have a rough sense of how we feel, which is unreliable, and we may have