About Obi

Biography

Obi Felten is the co-founder of Flourish Labs, a healthcare company on a mission to scale peer support with telehealth and AI to address the youth mental health crisis. Her team launched Peers.net, the first peer support telehealth service for teens and young adults; now part of WellSpace Health, a community health system in California.

Before founding her startup, Obi was Head of Getting Moonshots Ready for Contact with the Real World at Google X, Alphabet’s ‘moonshot factory’ and innovation lab. At X, Obi advanced cutting edge technology projects such as self-driving cars (Waymo), delivery drones (Wing), internet from balloons (Loon, now defunct), and sustainable energy storage using molten salt (Malta).

At Google’s Director of Consumer Marketing for Google in Europe, Middle East and Africa, her marketing team helped to launch and grow Google Maps, Chrome and Android from zero to hundreds of millions of users. She co-founded Campus, Google’s first startup hub for tech entrepreneurs that is credited with helping to kick-start the London startup ecosystem.

Previously, Obi launched the e-commerce business of a major UK retailer, led eToys.com’s expansion to Germany during the first dot-com boom, and worked on the launch of the UK’s first online bank.

Obi is a venture partner at Vitruvian Partners, a global private equity and growth investment firm. She is an independent director of Springer Nature (SPG.DE), a global academic publisher. She is an advisor to WellSpace Health and the Chelsea & Westminster NHS Trust. She previously served on the board of Marathon Health, a venture-backed primary healthcare company, where she was a comp committee member, and on the board of other startups and nonprofits.

Obi was honoured for her innovation work with the German Innovation Prize “Future Thinker” award. She was named a Financial Times Woman Changemaker by the Financial Times, a leading Woman in Tech by Focus magazine and Top 100 most influential German woman in business by Boston Consulting Group. She was on the cover of Vogue Germany’s business edition and has been interviewed by the The Financial Times, Fortune,, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Handelsblatt, Wirtschaftswoche, Fast Company, Wired, MIT Technology Review, the BBC, NBC News and on Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics ‘People I Mostly Admire’ podcast.

Obi grew up in Berlin and saw the wall come down, has a BA in Philosophy and Psychology from Oxford University, and lives in California. She loves yoga, cold water swimming, biking, skiing (learnt at age 40), paddleboarding, travelling, cooking, eating, and her family.

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