Haris Aghadi, Entrepreneur; Co-Founder, Meddy

Creating Healthy Connections in the Middle East and Beyond

Before Haris Aghadi (CMU 2014), patients in Qatar struggled to connect with health care providers.

A revolving population of expats, myriad health insurance companies and countless languages coupled with unreliable or non-existent medical websites combined to create a confusing and far from patient-friendly system.

“If you go to any family gathering, any dinner party, it's very common for people to ask if you know the dentist or if their pediatrician has left the country,” Haris says. “It always came up. We thought, ‘We come from a tech background. We could do something better.’”

The solution was Meddy, which started in one of his undergrad classes at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. Along with fellow CMU-Q alumni, Haris founded the company in 2015 and manually built Qatar’s most reliable and searchable database of doctors. During the pandemic, he added telehealth capabilities, too.

Meddy works with more than 2,000 health care specialists. They have more than 100,000 patient testimonials and generated more than $200 million in billings for health care providers in Qatar and United Arab Emirates.­­­­­­

In 2021, Meddy was acquired by Helium Health, integrated into the Nigeria-based health care company's suite of technology solutions and rebranded as HeliumDoc.

But because of Haris, who was recognized as one of Forbes Middle East’s 30 Under 30 Most Promising Young Professionals in 2021, acquiring reliable health care is now easier in Qatar, UAE and new markets in West and East Africa.

He recently launched his next venture, Paro, a home renovation marketplace to provide homeowners a joyful renovation experience.

“It’s very similar to Meddy as there is no reliable information online, and it’s a completely manual process,” Haris says. “We're starting with UAE because we understand the region extremely well, but we're actually building a global product.”

Story by Elizabeth Speed