Jon Brilliant
Jon Brilliant has been part of the founding team and CFO of three pioneering companies in the diabetes digital health/mHealth space. First, he was part of the founding team of Welldoc back in 2005 that became the first mobile app to obtain FDA clearance (2010 – a year before the mobile medical app regulations). He helped usher in an era and an industry and Welldoc has been called the granddaddy of digital health. Mr. Brilliant was instrumental in helping the company raise over $50M and pioneer a business model by finding a way to obtain FDA clearance for a mobile app that could be prescribed by doctors and reimbursed by payers.
Following his eight years at Welldoc, Mr. Brilliant, along with others personally affected by type 1 diabetes, co-founded Bigfoot Biomedical, which seeks to change the paradigm of care for insulin-requiring diabetes by leveraging data, connectivity, automation, and machine learning to reduce the burden on people with insulin-requiring diabetes and maximize the leverage of health care providers. Bigfoot launched the first connected insulin pen with clinical decision support in 2021. As Bigfoot’s CFO and then Chief Strategy Officer, he helped lead raising over $80M in debt and equity, as well as Bigfoot’s creation of a disruptive business model of a bundled monthly subscription service that meets the needs of payers in an ever-increasing outcome driven healthcare environment. Located in Silicon Valley and founded by proven entrepreneurs with track records of innovation and value creation, Bigfoot has been featured in the WSJ and in the Harvard Business Review article entitled: The Innovative Mindset Your Company Can’t Afford to Lose.
Most recently, along with two other pioneers in diabetes device space, Mr. Brilliant co-founded Luna Health, which was formed to bring the incredible and life-changing benefits of automated insulin delivery to the overwhelming majority of people living with diabetes who only use insulin pens. Luna is developing the world’s smallest automated insulin patch pump for nighttime glucose control. What Luna calls Better Nights for Better Days.
Mr. Brilliant has an incredibly diverse set of experiences that range from having operating roles in healthcare (Apricity Health (cancer), Celéri Health (pain), Luna Diabetes, Welldoc (diabetes), Bigfoot (diabetes), and Wright Medical (orthopedics)), automotive (JM Family), and retail (Harrods). During his professional career, he has been a Senior Advisor to Merck’s Global Health Innovation Fund, and a venture capitalist with his own fund (Atelier), a large European-based fund (Syntek Capital), and the family office of the former owner of Harrods. Jon has raised and invested billions of dollars in public and private markets, even helping restructure the debt of the country of Bolivia. Mr. Brilliant has served on the board of directors of over twenty companies, ranging in size from startups to over $500M in revenue.
Mr. Brilliant received his undergraduate degree in Accounting at The Pennsylvania State University while playing varsity tennis and earned his J.D. degree from Duke University School of Law.
