Arvana — Healthcare advisory & early-stage investments

About

A small practice, built around one conviction.

Arvana is my private practice, shaped by the work I've actually done. Over a decade of leading product teams across three continents and four industries, I kept arriving at the same quiet realisation: tech stacks change, AI changes, channels change. The person you're building for doesn't.

The products I've worked on that mattered all began with listening, and ended with something that fit into a real person's life rather than my roadmap. That's the one idea the practice rests on, and the only thing I'm interested in carrying forward.

Operator-led

Every engagement is led by someone who has built and shipped product. Nothing is subcontracted or white-labelled.

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User at the centre

Every decision begins with the person on the other end. AI doesn't change that, and neither does scale.

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Built across borders

A decade of leading product across India, the US and the UK. The lessons of scaling across markets are first-hand here, not theoretical.

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AI-era product thinking

Thinking carefully about what AI changes for your product, your users and your organisation — and, just as importantly, what it doesn't.

Practice

Two arms. One standard.

Arvana Advisory

Hands-on counsel for product, operations and technology leaders. I embed for a fixed period to help with a specific problem — the aim is work that gets used, not a deck that sits on a shelf.

Areas of work

AI-era product strategy
International expansion & scale-up
Healthcare product & clinical workflow
User research & discovery led engagements
Fractional product leadership

Discuss an engagement

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Arvana Capital

Personal cheques at the earliest stage. I back founders I think I can be genuinely useful to — usually in healthcare and B2B, where I've spent the last decade, with a quiet preference for women-led teams. Small cheques, honest conversations, and a long-term view. I don't lead rounds.

Where I tend to be most useful

B2B healthtech (provider, payor, infrastructure)
Compliance & clinical workflow tools
AI & automation in regulated environments
Women-led founding teams
Pre-seed to seed stage

Send me your work

Founder

One operator. Personally accountable.

Anushree Sharma

Founder

I'm currently VP of Product at Tendable, building tools that help providers stay on top of patient care and compliance without it feeling like a burden. Much of my recent focus is on using AI and automation to make compliance less reactive — catching issues before they become incidents, rather than scrambling afterwards.

I care about whether something works for the person using it, not only whether it works on paper.

I've spent ten years building product across healthtech and lifestyle, leading teams that ship. Before Tendable, I was co-founder and CPO at Nuw, a peer-to-peer marketplace working to take a small bite out of fast fashion. We raised $1.2M in pre-seed, moved into new markets, and tried to change how people think about their clothes. A steep learning curve, and one I'm grateful for.

My background is in Human-Computer Interaction, which still shapes how I approach product. That means a lot of user research, a healthy scepticism toward assumptions, and a long-standing interest in making complex systems feel simple.

Selected work

Building product, up close.

The Nuw community — members in recirculated, secondhand outfits

Nuw · Peer-to-peer fashion marketplace

Case study

Making clothes currency

Co-founder & Chief Product Officer

How we built a marketplace that lets people shop sustainably without paying a sustainability premium — by turning every unworn garment into spendable value.

Listings uploaded

Listings taken

⁻0%

Cost per listing,
after automation

$0M

Pre-seed raised

The problem

People want sustainable fashion. They won't pay more for it.

The sustainability paradox is brutal for any circular-fashion product: most consumers say they care, yet most spend still goes to cheap, unsustainable fast fashion. Resale exists, but it competes on virtue, not price — so it stays niche.

The honest conclusion we built around: mass adoption depends on out-pricing fast fashion, not out-moralising it. The product had to win on price first, and let sustainability follow by default.

"The only way this stops is if sustainable becomes affordable — I'm not spending £80 on a plain T-shirt."

The insight

Unsold clothes are worth nothing. So make them the currency.

The core mechanic reframed the whole transaction. Instead of pricing in cash — which forces haggling and constant comparison against Shein — every garment is worth the same: list an item, earn a coin; spend a coin, it's yours. The only money that changes hands is a small fixed fee plus delivery.

That one decision removes price as a barrier, gives people spending power before they spend anything, and makes the model sticky by construction — value only redeems inside the marketplace.

Sustainability becomes the by-product of the cheapest, easiest choice — not a tax the user opts into.

Turning a mechanic into a working marketplace

A two-sided market only works if supply, demand and economics move together. These were the product bets I led.

Automate listing to break the cost barrier

Manual listing throttled supply and drove cost. Letting users import items they'd bought elsewhere cut cost per listing by 86% — below our fixed fee — and importers listed 28 items on average. Supply stopped being the constraint.

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Match people to the brands they already buy

A marketplace dies if supply and demand don't meet. We focused on recirculating the high-street brands users actually requested, answering requests fast, and encouraging bundles — so the catalogue felt like the shops they loved, not a random bin.

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Design for side-switching, not single use

The strongest engagement came from users acting as both supplier and buyer. Leaning into that loop — list to earn, spend to acquire — meant demand could never deplete supply, and the app became a habit rather than a one-off clear-out.

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Remove the failure modes of resale

Because users can't extract cash, the usual marketplace scams disappear. Because there are no cash refunds — unwanted items get re-listed — returns stop being a cost centre. Community-accountability flows keep it trustworthy at scale.

The cheapest, easiest choice should also be the sustainable one.

Figures are from materials Nuw has shared publicly. Happy to talk through the reasoning, the trade-offs, and what we got wrong.

Bold counsel. Quiet capital.

A small practice, built around one conviction.

Two arms. One standard.

One operator. Personally accountable.

Building product, up close.

A small record of elsewhere.

A short list, growing slowly.

I answer every email.