Zoya Brar

Zoya Brar

She is the founder of CORE Diagnostics, the first molecular testing lab in India. She is focused on bringing cutting-edge innovation to the biosciences industry. A prodigious young entrepreneur, she founded CORE Diagnostics in 2012 when she was 23 years old, with venture capital funding from marquee VC firms in Silicon Valley, Boston, London, and Mumbai. She scaled it to 500+ employees and served 30 million patients in 13 countries, transforming a nascent enterprise into a leading genetic diagnostics player in Southeast Asia. 

She has received numerous awards for her work in healthcare and has been invited to speak at prestigious forums such as the Stanford Women in MedTech conference. Her contributions go well beyond biosciences. CORE was also a first-of-its-kind “social experiment” that resulted in building a non-hierarchical organization with a culture of radical transparency. This motivated Quest Diagnostics in the US to engage Zoya to help reimagine their leadership training programs. In 2020, she transitioned the CEO role to her successor – who she had developed over the past seven years – and moved to Vancouver. Prior to founding CORE, Zoya worked at Google for two years. She continues to be an Executive Advisor to CORE. She now works with many startups in Canada and the US in a mentor and advisory capacity. She is especially passionate about women-led and women-funded startups. In one of her several professional endeavors, she works with a women’s health startup, Eli Health in Montreal as Chief of Staff to the CEO. While her identity as a woman in leadership was shaped by her mother – a physician turned CEO – throughout her upbringing, it has come full circle after becoming a mother of two children.