As a second-year Titan 100, Anju Mathew said that it feels great to be recognized for all the hard work that has gone into building her company, OncoLens. “It’s also amazingly humbling to see how others have tackled great challenges and built game-changing, impactful businesses across the state,” she said. “I find the greatest value in this platform is the ability to engage with these true titans, learn from them and share what I have learnt along the way.”
Mathew is the founder and CEO of OncoLens in the digital healthcare market with a vision for every cancer patient to have access to the best possible minds, therapies and innovations in care – in time to make a difference.
Mathew has spent the last year positioning the company decisively to the right market after a tough year for U.S. markets and healthcare. “As the market turned, I was able to recognize early that our cash cow product solution for care team collaboration would not get as much market uptake as it did in previous years,” she said. “However, the need for clinical trial patient matching solutions to find patients in time is of high market need today as cancer centers have invested in trials but remain unable to accrue patients to those.”
Under Mathew’s leadership, OncoLens quickly took advantage of new AI/LLM solutions and positioned the company quickly to take advantage of this market need. “This required a consistent and ongoing effort including new product development and upskilling and retraining a team,” Mathew said. “By working closely with my management team, we were able to make big strides this year.”
According to Mathew, this year has been about behavior change in so many ways. “Understanding how people approach working from home, understanding what they believe is important in life and understanding what can help make them change behavior was critical for me to learn how I can influence others,” she said. “To address this, I had to learn patience and expect to repeat the same vision and messaging multiple times and I had to rethink incentives and what drove satisfaction and performance.”
As a result, Mathew said she also had to learn how to communicate better with encouragement, succinctness and empathy to her employees so they could understand and buy into the company’s vision. This prompted an incorporation of career tracks for most of the organization so employees understand their ability to grow with the company.
“Building support through persuasion, education and patience is critical to make a vision a reality,” said Mathew. “I’ve found that my ability to identify complex patterns forming early on has helped me significantly and being able to see them early enough to be able to proactively address them has helped significantly.”
