This is an interview with Nora Cavani, CEO and co-founder of child gut health company Alba Health.
Can you tell us about your background?
My training is in molecular biology, with a specialism in pharmaceutical engineering. Before starting Alba, I was a consultant at BCG, which gave me an unusual vantage point – I understood both how the science worked and how to build a business around it.
Can you share more about your story around starting to look into gut health to tackle your eczema?
What had started as a small, easy-to-ignore patch in my early twenties, quickly took over my whole body. By the time I was 27, I was in constant pain, bleeding, and getting repeated infections. I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a stretch. The unfortunate irony was that I’d spent so much time in pharma working on the very steroid creams that doctors were prescribing me. They’d calm things down temporarily, but the symptoms always came back harder.
Eventually I stopped fixating on my skin and started asking what was happening underneath it. I discovered significant imbalances in my gut microbiome and set about changing them through diet. My skin cleared, and (thankfully!) I’ve had no symptoms for two years now. Even my doctors were surprised at the results.
Once I started reading the research, it became impossible to see the gut as just one piece of the puzzle. It’s connected to inflammation, to immunity, to mental health, to so much of how our bodies function long-term. And early childhood is the window where you can really influence it.
How did you turn this into a business?
I couldn’t just sit on what I’d learned and do nothing. I spent months calling over 200 scientists, working out whether what I’d experienced was reproducible and whether there was a way to build something around it. Through those conversations, I found Professor Willem de Vos, who is among the most cited microbiome researchers in the world with over 900 publications.
We founded Alba together in 2022.
Now we have a community of over 60,000 families and are one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Sweden. We’ve built our platform on 15+ years of research, and 1M proprietary data points on child gut health. Recently, we passed 40k sign ups for our webinars/masterclasses. I was named Dagens Industri’s Female Entrepreneur of the Year 2026, which was a real privilege, and felt like a real benchmark in how far Alba has come.
Do we need to make a shift in healthcare to focus on prevention and not just treatment?
Without question – we’ve been slow about it, and our approach to health, as a society, is all wrong. The average person’s default mindset is reactive, waiting for illness before they try to manage it. For conditions like allergies, eczema, and asthma, that approach is inadequate – you need a proactive, and preventative approach.
The foundations of those conditions are created in the first 1,000 days of life, and they need to be managed accordingly. Add to that the fact that our diets, environments, and antibiotic use have diverged dramatically from what our bodies evolved alongside, and you start to understand why chronic illness rates keep climbing. The science tells us the gut microbiome shaped in early childhood has a measurable influence on health decades later. That means early intervention is, without doubt, the most logical place to act.
What is the commercial opportunity in preventative health?
It’s substantial, and most of it remains untapped. A third of school-aged children have an allergic condition. Research published in 2024 found that one in four British children had developed a chronic health condition before the age of 16. More than half of babies globally experience gut-related symptoms of some kind. These affect families everywhere, and the healthcare system’s answer is almost always reactive. We’ve grown 20% month-on-month since launch, much of it driven by word of mouth, which tells you the demand for something evidence-based and proactive is very real.
What impact is AI having on the healthcare space?
The fundamental shift AI enables is personalisation at scale, which was simply not feasible before. In preventative health especially, what works for one person’s gut may not work for another’s. The human body is an incredibly individualised system – and AI expedites the process of taking complex, multi-variable health data, and turning it into guidance that’s specific to the individual. We’re still in early stages, but the ability to offer personalised advice, at scale, is without doubt a positive.
Can you give examples of where AI and data is positively impacting health outcomes?
At Alba we’ve built a proprietary platform that links gut health data to hundreds of distinct parental concerns, drawing on over 300,000 data points. That volume lets us identify patterns no individual clinician could spot on their own, and translate them into specific, actionable guidance. For example, our data shows that some children respond well to one probiotic strain, while others need a completely different one.
That kind of granularity ultimately isn’t possible without the data infrastructure behind it. AI is collapsing the timeline between research discovery and practical application – insights that would have taken years to filter through traditional research cycles are becoming usable tools for families much faster.
What next for Alba Health?
We’re expanding across Europe and increasingly being approached by medical clinics who want to integrate Alba as a nutrition support layer within their own practice – they see us as a complement to clinical care, not a replacement for it. The longer-term ambition is to be the resource parents turn to first when they want to understand and support their child’s health – from the earliest days onwards.