Our Story
PROUDLY FOUNDED IN POLAND
The Data Lake Story
Data Lake started as a question posed by two medical doctors - a question that represented one of the largest stumbling blocks to medical progress; why is it so hard to access unbiased medical data?
Having both founded e-Health startups in the past, they knew how great the need for high-quality medical data was for researchers. They also knew how complex the issue was – technologically, legally, and ethically. But breakthrough treatments, improved patient outcomes, A.I. for disease detection – even complete cures for illnesses – all were within reach; the problem was the data. If they could find a legal, ethical way to connect medical data sources to researchers, medicine had the potential to jump light-years ahead.
The co-founders weren’t jumping in to such an enormous task blindly. While still in medical school, Wojciech Sierocki founded the humanitarian organization Treatment With A Mission. Four years later, he founded a telemedicine startup called eMedica, implementing breakthrough technologies in rural areas of Kenya for the remote monitoring of pregnant mothers. Co-founder Ligia Kornowska was also an entrepreneurial leader, previously founding several medical startups in the field of telemedicine, AI and health, including as CEO of the Medical Telemonitoring Center – the first healthcare entity providing KTG analysis and care for pregnant women 24/7.
They both dedicated themselves full time to the project, and soon the idea of Data Lake began to form; building a data access layer to a global, interconnected system of medical data that has been donated based on patient consent. Not only would it be able to provide researchers with billions of datapoints to be used in the advancement of medical science and technology, but with the right technology it could be done safely, privately, and globally.
The founders strongly believe that patients should be involved in their own healthcare, and that the primary pillars of any healthcare data system they were to build should be privacy, informed consent, transparency, and equity. Additionally, they believed that access to medical data should be within reach of all research budgets, not just something that big money operations could afford. Democratizing access to medical data and making it more equitable would have huge implications for research worldwide.
Our mission of solving access to and bias in medical data with technology is laying the foundation for what Data Lake is becoming today; a leader helping power the next generation wave of healthcare and medicine.